Picking figures from the air

As well as silly motions the Budget was also discussed, but was hardly dissected at the last council meeting on Wednesday.
Here's some things which might have been missed; this budget saw the continuation of last years smash and grab raid on various council services.
In an Oscar like ceremony the leader of the council praised various departments for making tough decisions on "efficiency savings".
This is where we have difficulty with this budget and its from purely philosophical reasons, namely if it is an "efficiently saving" then it really can't be a tough decision, as it is by definition the most efficient, and therefore least troubling way of doing something. If however, the dear leader was to call these by there more common term, namely "cuts", then this would be easier for our simple minds to understand.
One area which will not directly be seeing many cuts will the be grass and hedges of the Council's parks, this is because of the "efficiency savings" which a review, which is yet to take place, has said will be found in the parks and leisure services department. We say will because in many cases that exactly what's planned, a review is to be set up to to find £xxx,xxx worth of savings, but what they don't know is how they will do it, nor do they know what staffing implications there will be. Hardly the most logically way to go about it.
Just warm yourselves knowing that your tax is going up by around 2%. Aren't we lucky!

Council leader makes spurious Council Tax claim

According to the Council Leader, Chris Roberts, Greenwich Council's "collection of Council Tax has proved consistently efficient". Yes... that's rights.... being ranked 332 out of the 354 Councils in England in relation to the amount of arrears that are not collected is apparently "consisently efficient".

It's fair to say that Council Tax collection is "consistent". Consistently bad. Whilst Chris Roberts may think that reptititon of the lie will make it true, the figures clearly speak for themselves. The Council fails to collect more and more Council Tax every year. It is also amongst the worst Councils in the country at collecting Council Tax.

Greenwich fails to collect £4.9m in Council Tax

Why is Greenwich Council so bad at collecting Council Tax? According to figures from the GMB Union it is among the bottom 20 Council in the country (see note 3 in link). During 2005/06 the total Council Tax that was not collected was £4.9m. That's nearly £5m of tax the Council is NOT collecting.

What we thought particularly ironic was that the figures are on the GMB site and apparently - assuming we've got our facts right - they just happen to be the last people to employ Chris Roberts before he foisted himself on to the taxpayer of Greenwich.

Of course there is a much wider point here. If the Council is failing to collect such large sums of money, why have there been yearly increases in the Council Tax to gain extra funds that are a fraction of the arrears? Perhaps the Council should concentrate on arrears rather than regular rises?