The level of tax is back on the agenda. Many of you are telling me that Council taxes are too high already. People are dreading next year’s bills.

Nationwide we are looking at inflation busting increases of  6% or more, at a time when wages are going up by much less, and when pensions are going up by little or nothing, The good news in Wokingham is the Council has been more prudent than most, and will come in with one of the lower increases.

We are not far away from Chancellor Brown’s budget. It will remind us all by how much national taxes have gone up in recent years. It also reminds us that Wokingham does not get its fair share of taxes back. We send the money to Whitehall, but they seem reluctant to send enough to us to pay for our schools, hospitals and other local services. In recent years more and more of the tax we pay has been sent elsewhere.
      
One of the reasons is the enormous waste and unnecessary expenditure the government has unleashed. Last week in the House we learned the Crown Prosecution Service is likely to be the latest in a long line of government bodies that will be given a new name and a new image. When I asked how much it would cost, the Minister did not know. To her it was someone else’s money that will go on the paint job. A large army of  people, all with new offices, will be recruited to replace the Lord Chancellor. We have new and useless regulators and Strategic authorities like the Strategic  Rail Authority and the regional governments, all with their hands in our pockets. If only ministers would spend public money as if it were their own we could prevent these large increases in tax.

This week I received an answer from the Chancellor that Inheritance Tax has become a tax on the prudent middle income voters. It is not a tax on the rich. Only a tiny 11% of the tax is paid by people passing on estates of over £1million. The bulk of the tax is now paid by people like my constituents trying to bequeath their homes to their children who then end up with a huge tax bill. It is not what was intended when it was introduced. It also shows that the very rich can still afford good lawyers and accountants to plan their way round much of it. It is high time the threshold was raised.

Last week one of my colleagues put forward a Bill to give to local authorities the power to decide how many new homes should be built in their area. Many of us are fed up with  John Prescott’s bulldozer threatening so many more green fields in the South-east. He aims to override local wishes, to insist on higher density developments, and to erode our green spaces. I was happy to lend my name to the Bill. Unfortunately the government will have none of it and will make sure it cannot carry. It was just one more way to make the point to them that there do have to be some limits on the scale and density of development.