All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others. Animal Farm by George Orwell (1945)
Council tax was created by a panics-stricken Conservative government after the Poll Tax riots. Eight bands were created and were meant to be reviewed every five years. George Osborne’s fiscal extremism was the coup de grace for local finance.It destroyed any sense of reality for councillors who have resorted to borrowing to pay current expenditure. The local authority credit cardhas, as it were, been maxed out. Osborne and expanding duties made bankruptcy inevitable with a mountain of debt for future generations. But, as Orwell would have said: not all councils are equal.
The 2025-6 council tax for Westminster is astonishing. Band ‘D’ is the mid-point in the council tax system and they have set the charge at £1,019. 17 miles to the east, and on a different fiscal planet, Havering’s band ‘D’ charge is £2,313.55. This is above band ‘H’ in Westminster.1
As might be expected, Westminster house prices are very high.2 The first house available on Rightmove costs £2.6m. (The second house listed is £80m.) Being immensely rich means Westminster has many more band ‘H’ houses than Havering.3 Many more is a galactic under-statement. Romford constituency has 40 band ‘H’ houses, Hornchurch and Upminster has 320 and Westminster……..15,530!
Obviously their revenue base is huge. Westminster’s band ‘H’ council tax is £2,038. For Havering it is £4,627, which is too low.4
Havering has been wrecked by (a) national politicians and their cowardice, (b) Conservative extremism, (c) ever expanding duties for adult services and homelessness and (d) local delusions.
Notes
1 Westminster council tax bands & costs 2025/26
2 Properties For Sale in Westminster | Rightmove
3 d:\Users\Chris\Downloads\CTSOP2_1_adhoc_2015_2024 (1).zip 4 Council Tax bands and bills | London Borough of Havering
Politics in Havering 
I’ve explained this before at full council so all councillors know the truth, but are too feeble to act by taking legal action, but I’ll explain it again for your blog readers.
The Lord Scarman report into the Brixton riots had a choice. Blame the riots on violent black criminals protesting against police enforcement of the drug laws or on ‘institutional racism’!
The fool chose the latter and advised more spending was needed in our ‘inner-cities to address “racism” without any specific policies being suggested.
Thatcher acted on the recommendation, but to avoid being seen by her supporters to be rewarding rioters she hid the extra funding within the biased government funding formulas. And Labour supported the biased funding too.
For example, the formula gave more money depending on “density of population”. Urban areas are more dense than rural areas. Havering is actually a dense urban area, except as 50% of the borough is green belt its statistically less dense than our inner-cities, so gets less funding.
A genuine response to a social justice question is to identify the issue and target a response. Instead the biased funding formulas just prioritised extra spending to our inner-cities, and this resulted in wealthy areas being deemed deprived and got extra funding along with more ‘deprived areas’ aka the riot areas!
The truth is Westminster is so rich they don’t need to charge council tax but that would give the game away so they have to charge something.
I recall the conservative boasting about Wandsworth’s low council tax as an example of a prudent conservative council, ignoring the fact they could do this due to their massive government grant compared to Havering and most areas of Britain.
The problem is once a biased formula is in place it can’t be easily changed, hence why all the years of lobbying the Minister ends in failure and why only legal action using anti-discrinmination legislation has a chance of success.
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The *pass the parcel* attitude that government has about local government finance has now reached a tipping point. There is every possibility of wide-spread bankruptcy in councils of every political colour. As long as local government is used to deliver statutory services and is therefore only a conduit for government expenditure the pressure will destroy local decision-making and therefore local democracy.
Westminster and Wandsworth are both outliers in local government. Core activity has evaporated and now the music has stopped and the Labour government is frantically looking a fudge to tide it over. Unfortunately, for them the crisis is now and the big decisions can’t be avoided.
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The problem is successive governments have gutted local democracy by centralising and transferring power and funding to government and their appointed/unelected Quangos.
To placate councillors New Labour and Conservative promoted weekly wages for councillors irrespective of workload or attendance aka “the redundancy payments of local democracy”, creating a supine political class ready to treat the position of councillor as a sinecure leaving the running of councils to officers who also follow government policy.
Hence the ease with which a majority of councillors changed sides following the May 2022 local elections!
For 40 years Labour, Conservative and now HRA take part in the annual futile ritual of lobbying the Minister and urging residents to “sign the petition” knowing its a waste of time as the biased funding is due to successive government policy NOT an oversight.
That said, New Labour MK II is pushing up all bills with their crazy “Net-Zero”, “Woke racism” and “pro-war” policies that is burying local government with wasteful spending and mounting debt, with Starmer e.g. promising Ukraine with £3 billion a years for “as long as it takes” aka forever!
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Local democracy has died with the burden of statutory duties and under-funding.
The cult of Thatcher and *low taxes* has wrecked the country. Welfare policies are very expensive but bind society together.
Cherry-picking bits of government spending that you don’t like is pointless. I’d point at transport policies for example and not what you highlight.
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“I’d point at transport policies for example and not what you highlight”. What, HS2? An EU vanity project! And PFI? The most expensive way ever devised to fund public infrastructure projects!
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Thanks for your blog. Ignore the reactionary boomers.
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Thank you for your comment.
I try to treat every comment with respect.
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