Sir Humphrey Appleby would be proud of Weymouth & Portland Borough Council’s latest exercise in local democracy. The story runs as follows.
Most of you will be aware of a scheme known as Local Council Tax Support. This nominally exists to help those who are on such low incomes they would have difficulty in paying their Council Tax in full. Under the current formulation of the scheme, everyone of working age, except the most vulnerable, has to pay at least 8.5% towards their Council Tax.
Those of you paying attention to the matters of import that seize our leaders in Westminster will be aware that the Government has announced its intention to cut the level of funding it awards Councils next year. From the information put out by W&PBC on the matter, one is led to believe that W&PBC have no idea how big this cut is going to be. None the less, as a good and diligent body W&PBC is prompted to review its Local Council Tax Support scheme for 2014/2015.
Rubbish! The cut announced by the Government is 2%. It is disingenuous of W&PBC to pretend otherwise, though how else can they propose an LCTS that would limit the maximum entitlement award to 20%? This would apply to everyone of working age, except the most vulnerable (remember the phrase). In other words, a person receiving the maximum relief at present would be faced with a rise of 236%. This starts to look like a nice little earner for W&PBC.
Yet huzzah! It is to W&PBC’s credit that they see they should do the decent thing and seek reactions to the proposal from residents, businesses, and others by means of an on-line survey, which you, good citizen, can find at https://www.dorsetforyou.com/counciltaxsupportconsultation/wdwp. This is all very fine and decent stuff. This is local democracy in action, isn’t it? Let’s have a look…
Those of you familiar with the machinations of Sir Humphrey Appleby, in the timeless ‘Yes (Prime) Minister’ comedy series will recall the hapless Jim Hacker falling time and again for Sir Humphrey’s apparently innocuous way of asking questions in such a way that he always got the answer he required. Well, it seems that someone at W&PBC has been paying close attention.
The survey offered by W&PBC is very short – people like short surveys – and it is only the first page that carries any significance. It is shown in the screenshot. Consider the multiple choice questions under Q1:
Any costs of changes to the current scheme should be paid for from other council services or by increasing Council Tax. – Hang on! What are the ‘other council services’ they have in mind? What size of cuts are we talking about? Which groups will be affected? How big a Council Tax increase is being suggested? It takes little to work out that this is a very neat way of getting people to ask for further cuts to services in order to avoid having to pay more Council Tax. Leaving aside the matter of the LCTS, this is you, good citizen, giving W&PBC carte blanche.
Everyone of working age should pay something towards their Council Tax except the most vulnerable people. – Perfectly reasonable, but how is ‘something’ to be defined? What are the criteria by which ‘something’ will be limited? Who are the ‘most vulnerable’? The phrase ‘most vulnerable’ keeps cropping up, but nowhere is it defined. It doesn’t have to be, we all know who the most vulnerable are, don’t we? Given the way in which the government has whipped up a wave of anti-disability feeling with the police reporting a significant rise in disability hate crime, I suspect that we do not.
The maximum Council Tax support given to non-protected groups should be limited to 80% of the amount due. – On what basis? What are the criteria that suggest 80% as an appropriate level? The cut they are facing is 2% not 11.5%. Where did this apparently arbitrary figure come from? Why is the LCTS to take such a hit?
Taken together, one can only conclude that the grossly biassed formulation and combination of these three questions in fact signals a decision already taken by the Tory-led W&PBC to hammer yet again those at the bottom of the Weymouth and Portland pile.
Yet, the most important question has not yet been asked! Where is the question that offers the choice of retaining the status quo?. There is no possible combination of answers to any of the questions that would imply retention of the current LCTS, i.e. an 8.5% maximum contribution from the Housing Benefit recipient. The only opportunity to explicitly offer this as a preference is in the Comments box in Q2.
This is the final twist. The answers to the three multiple choice questions in Q1 can be easily scored and reduced to percentages. The way the survey is skewed those scores will assuredly show that the people of Weymouth and Portland agree with the proposed change to the LCTS and a reduction in services in general. Since the content of the comments box cannot easily be analysed in order to derive some additional qualifying score that might somehow moderate the multiple choice score, Q2 is in effect pointless. Even if W&PBC officials bother to read its contents they can simply write off any objections as disparate, since people are unlikely to write precisely the same objections in precisely the same way, or few and insignificant since people tend not to fill in comments boxes anyway.
Stendahl remarked, “The shepherd always tries to persuade the sheep that their interests and his own are the same.” Sir Humphrey just tricks them into the same conclusion.
Ian Sedwell
