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Adjournment (Whitsun)

As a former member of Bedfordshire county council, I confess to some sadness when Luton took that step eight years ago, but I can understand why it did so. For people living in Bedfordshire, that draws attention to the potential advantages of unitary authorities rather than to the situation we face at district and county council level. The county council is run with a rod of iron by the Conservative party. For the past eight years, until the recent elections, the ruling Conservative group had only a small majority, yet it refused to allocate places on the executive and other structures to the Labour and Liberal Democrat groups. The poor performance and high taxing of Bedfordshire is thus entirely down to the Conservatives. They can blame no other group, and certainly not the council staff. The Conservative group in Bedfordshire bears full responsibility for what is happening, so guess what happened at the county council elections three weeks ago? The demonstrably failed Conservative group, which had increased its overall majority from one in 1997 to three in 2001, was gratefully rewarded by the people of Bedfordshire for being pretty useless by an increase in its majority to 20. Surely that is one of the most bizarre election results of all time. Perhaps Bedfordshire Conservatives could let us into their secret. Do they have a Blarney stone hidden in the bowels of county hall, or do they perform the darks arts in some way to mask what they have really done to the people of Bedfordshire? I add in haste, however, that the people of Bedford and Kempston did not come under that spell to the same extent as those elsewhere in the county. In the constituency that I have the honour to represent there are only three Conservative county councillors out of 11, and six of them are Labour. The residents of Bedford and Kempston understand that the council tax is a Tory tax made worse by a Tory council. They also understand that a Labour Government are most likely to bring about the necessary changes in the funding of local councils and to make funding fairer, more transparent and more effective. Although a high-taxing authority such as Bedfordshire county council puts an added burden on local residents, it has to be said that there are systemic weaknesses with the council tax itself, and I shall now turn to those. First, it is inherently regressive and that is reflected in the fact that although a person on band H pays three times more than someone on band A, the band H property is valued at eight times more than the property on band A. Secondly, there is the gearing effect due to the fact that the council tax raises about 26 per cent. of local council budgets. That means that if a council wishes to raise its budget by an extra 1 per cent. from the council tax, the tax has to go up by about 4 per cent. Above-inflation increases are very difficult to avoid and will always tend to make the council tax stand out as a big tax unless we make radical changes.