Too many people accept Council lies when they say government grants have been cut as they usually go up, and when they say they have to spend all the money under government orders. Councils have wide ranging discretion over spending in many areas, and usually overextend their remits and spending to indulge themselves, employ too many staff and seek to compete with private sector leisure and sport facilities with subsidised offers. They are keen to draw down grants for spending items they do not have to do just because there is a grant available. They are often wanton with capital as they have access to plenty of subsidised borrowing.
If you want to make your Councillor more accountable, ask them a simple question. What is the total spend of your Council this year? Most will confess they have no idea. A few will venture a figure. The figures given are usually well below the true total. They often miss out all the capital spend and borrowing. They often miss out the Education budget as it is usually covered by a full government grant. They sometimes offer a figure that is net of all government grants. They rarely know if you ask a supplementary what the actual definition of the spending figure they have been given is.
The officers often produce extremely complex figures making it difficult for Councillors to see just how much spending they are in practice approving. Years ago when I was a County Councillor I needed to insist on simple total cash spend figures, as the officers in inflationary times always wanted to show us inflation adjusted so called real figures to disguise the large increase in cash outgoings. Looking at Council websites on finance today there are a variety of ways of netting off grants, trading income, and borrowings to give the impression of a lower total.
Councils are usually desperate to spend more. They grab any grant going, however undesirable the purpose of the spending as it does not directly bear on the Council tax. They are desperate to get up their trading income by milking motorists with high car park charges. They ignore the fact that their Council tax payers are also national taxpayers having to pay for the grant, and ignore the way the grant may buy a capital asset or put in a service which then comes to impose costs directly on Council taxpayers in later years.
I did persuade the last government to get some control over wanton buying of commercial property as “investments” just before a likely collapse in shop values from the growth in on line retail. There need to be stronger controls on municipalisation, on buying up property in the Council area, and on “investing” in green technologies which should be done by the private sector under a market test.
NB Government grants, business rates, Council tax and schools grant for English local government was £77bn in 2019 and £145 bn 2026. What cuts?
May 9, 2026
Good morning.
It is time we linked usage to each and every household. Those that consume more should pay more. If I went to a restaurant, a supermarket or a petrol station, even my utility bills, I am charged for my consumption. Why can I not be presented with a list of services the council offers with associated costs, and choose from those ? With street lighting be an exception as it is universal. Doing this would automatically both control costs and improve efficiency as the council will have only a fixed and known sum to spend.
As for yesterdays elections, didn’t the established partied do well – NOT !!
Since BREXIT we the people have had few opportunities to express our unhappiness with the way we are going. Unfortunately it seems, the message has not gotten through even to the dumbest of MP’s.
They all know their time is up.
Reply Street lighting is not universal. Glad to say we do not have any in my area.You need it in public spaces with nighttime footfall. I agree more consumer charging for some discretionary services makes sense but not for core education and social services. Road pricing could work for national highways but difficult for local roads and very unpopular .
May 9, 2026
The cost of street lighting has fallen hugely with new technology. LEDs being even more efficient than High Pressure Sodium (that unpleasant but energy efficient orange glow lighting). They also reduced car accidents especially in fog. It could be even cheaper still if we had electricity at under 25% of current cost as they have in many places USA and China for example by ditching May and Ed’s net zero lunacy. Not that it is needed in all areas – people have torches on their mobiles and light on their cars and bike now after all.
In Episode 77 of the Sceptic podcast, host Laurie Wastell speaks to Chris Morrison, the Daily Sceptic’s environment editor, on the sensational admission even by UN scientists that widely reported climate alarmist forecasts are totally “implausible” – and how it blows apart decades of their evil fear mongering lies.
I suppose it is too late now for people like King Charles, Greta, the BBC, Theresa May, Milliband, Cameron, Boris, Sunak, Starmer and Saint David Attenborough to finally admit they have been wrongly frightening people with bogus and totally unscientific claims for so many years and shutting down open discussion. I suppose they saw it as a noble lie it was not it was endless vastly expensive, evil & damaging lies. How many months to save the world now King Charles and what is your personal lifetime CO2 output PA?
May 9, 2026
Never mind, Gordon Brown is back as a special advisor on Global Finance. He has insights on gold prices and how to manage pensions. He did not look in great shape shuffling out of 10 Downing Street in a shiny blue suit though.
Harriet Harperson is also a special advisor on girls and women.
May 9, 2026
Hopefully Reform will employ forensic accountants in the councils they now control to root out the waste and miss allocation of funds. Buying electric bin lorries failure, building new headquarters without re purpose ingredients existing buildings and getting rid of all DEI and climate change staff.
There’s plenty of work to be done
Pulling out of the migrant resettlement scheme is a good start
May 9, 2026
One of our Reform county councillors is a forensic accountant and is making significant savings from the budget, so it would be a good idea for other councils to employ an independent accountant to review their books. He found the last council had locked away 10s of millions of pounds in government bonds that don’t mature for 100 years. I don’t pay my council tax for the benefit of those who will live here in a hundred years. We also plan to withdraw from the migrant resettlement scheme and house our own homeless. The councillors have voted not to increase their allowances. The terrible potholes left by the last council are now being fixed. All DEI funding has been scrapped, with hires based on merit, not diversity. Net-Zero spending has been axed. Our council tax increase is one of the lowest in the country. So after one year, I’m very happy with our Reform County Council, and I hope all the new councillors elected yesterday manage to turn their areas around.
Reply I do not believe most of these slogans. The UK government never issues bonds with a duration longer than 50 years, nor Uk companies . If a council buys longish bonds they can anyway always sell before maturity if they need the money. A Council cannot refuse to house homeless people under UK law. DEI is written into Uk employment and equalities law so all council employers need to observe the law or else could lose expensive court cases and need to pay compensation . I doubt your Council has made any HR and legal personnel redundant to get a saving.What net zero savings have been made?
May 9, 2026
It is absurd that bonds should run longer than 10 years. The world and indeed individual countries can change beyond wild dreams in 10 years let alone 50.
May 9, 2026
The law with regards to DEI prevents discrimination Lord Redwood, there is no need for positive action nor favored status. Everyone, including middle aged white guys should be treated equally.
May 9, 2026
Some bright spark once said, “When the majority have their hands in the public purse, democracy dies.”
So it is proving in Britain.
May 9, 2026
Democracy dies indeed. Plus the doom loop means they rapidly run out of money and the benefits run out.
We see in the election results the success of dire left wing parties like Plaid, SNP, the Greens, the LibDims. It seems the totally mad and anti-Semitic Greens are heavily supported student and you women especially.
Cambridge now:-
Labour 17 seats
Green Party 12 seats
Liberal Democrats 11 seats
Conservative 1 seat
Your Party 1 seat.
Oxford
Labour – 20 seats
Green – 13 seats
Liberal Democrat – 9 seats
Independent Oxford Alliance – 4 seats
Real Independents – 2 seats
What on earth is wrong with the voters and allegedly “bright” student voters of Cambridge and Oxford?
Cambridge had a Tory MP back in the 79 under Thatcher. No Reform at all and just one Conservative! Mad deluded socialism in every direction now. What sort of education have these “bright” student had?
Reply A majority of the voters are not students,but modern students are less conservative than previous generations. Oxford West was aConservative seat for sometime. Young people have often given up on the idea of getting a good job and a home of their own so they favour reliance on the state and the politics of protest.
May 9, 2026
R to R. This is true, as it was for Wokingham, Witney and others. Whereas Oxford and Cambridge have gone Green on the back of fantasy politics “under the influence”, Wokingham, Witney and Conservatives generally have suffered through the diabolical May/Cameron/Johnson/Sunak muck up of Brexit. Cameron should have had a plan and implemented it. Cameron broke the Conservatives as surely as Starmer is breaking Labour.
May 9, 2026
To reply – Are they not bright enough to see that this is a doom loop agenda? Ever fewer people to tax ever more snouts at the trough.
Long term bond rates are 6% already.
As Starkey put it “Blair was worse than two world wars” and Cameron heir to Blair et al undid almost nothing of this they even built on this doom loop lunacy resulting in Starmer’s vast majority!
May 9, 2026
I don’t think students should be allowed to vote where they study as it skews the results in large university towns and cities. Like ex-pats they should vote in the area they previously lived. Also foreign non-taxpayers shouldn’t have the right to vote in our elections.
May 9, 2026
nobody in the country on a temporary visa should be allowed to vote or stand as a candidate.
May 9, 2026
I totally agree with you, Christine!
Students come and go, the local people, don’t!
May 9, 2026
Real democracy is surely people voting to say how their taxes should be spent. No taxation with representation. So if more than 50% live of the back of others and pay no net tax they are likely to vote “spent on me please” so the actual tax payers get no meaningful representation.
Should people who do not net pay in get any say in how other people’s taxpayers money is spent?
May 9, 2026
You then get politicians who promise to steal money of the rich and hard working to try to buy the votes of those largely living off the work of others. So fewer and fewer rich and hard working remain. This is the Starmer/Reeves socialist doom loop agenda we are now on. We were under the Tories too.
May 9, 2026
@Peter Gardner – maliciously killed off in the UK, to ensure those with power can stay in power and free-load
May 9, 2026
Re: PG, ‘How democracies die’ S.Levitsky, D.Ziblatt, 2018 and at the time Prof Matt Goodwin (remember him?) was writing about it: ‘I don’t say ‘must read’ often but this book sits firmly within that category.’
May 9, 2026
A the same Matt Goodwin from ‘Hope not Hate’?
May 9, 2026
Democracy was already dead when I assessed what it amounted to in GB as a young teenager way over 60 years ago.
In the last 2 decades media has informed a great deal of reality about how power is acquired, used and corrupted.
Democracy is a joke term and aspiration.
May 9, 2026
Perhaps start with making MPs accountable? There are fewer of them, they control a very large budget, and supposedly they are our brightest and best. They also get paid a lot more than the average local councillor. If we could find a means of getting them to stick to electoral promises (force majeure excepted) we could test it out on the army of local councillors.
I’ve been a local councillor and made a huge effort to deliver on my electoral promise (a local issue). It took me 2 terms. I had to join the Tories for my second term to avoid any further progress from being blocked, out of simple spite on behalf of the Tory majority. Most councillors could not understand finances and let the officers lead. from laziness or fear. To get more accountabiliry we should scrap Party politics at the local level and make it easier to remove senior officers, who in my old Council were the real power.
May 9, 2026
Agreed.
May 9, 2026
Well John, you have lifted a lid that desperately wants to remain closed.
When you talk about councillors, you are inferring tyhey are the ones that control the spending levels of councils and they are the ones who decide on what level of spend is required.
The picture painted by local authorities is much more sinister. In my own area the local council has been guilty of massive (bad spending Ed)the key permanent staff/officials have had to step down, basically retire because local government always give them that soft option out of the public eye.
The council have been technically within 114 status without declaring it and constantly saying we must avoid 114 declaration ( bankruptcy in normal parlance).
The levels of ( waste ed) are clear for those who look to see, yet the system continues to hide the details behind ever more convoluted accounting practices. No one not even elected councillors can get any detail on financial numbers in any meaningful format.
I have asked senior councillors for numbers and they simply do not have them claiming they are not released and any numbers they are given are subject to strict security/secrecy rules preventing them divulging detail.
It is tantamount to systemised …..cover up.
Reply All are innocent unless proved guilty of fraud. I suspect most Councils are guilty of waste, inefficiency, bad financial judgement and needless spending but not fraud. You should spell out the wasteful spending in detail but only allege fraud if you have sent convincing evidence of a possible crime to the authorities.
May 9, 2026
@Reply – as with other comments here today there appears to be big disconnect on the purpose of the job locally and nationally. What is loosely called democracy, most of us on the outside looking in would infer we have empowered and paid someone to hold the system and structures to account on our behalf. On behalf of those paying the Bills. To do that transparency would be at the heat of every situation. If those we elect cant get to the bottom of a situation someone needs firing or they themselves should step down
May 9, 2026
John, the evidence is there showing ( possible wrongs?)but it is being purposely buried by process rules. The scale of the ( possibly bad deals ed) and the trail of officials that have exited the stage in the way these officials do, with minimum fuss and zero explanation are well known but kept undercover from wider awareness.
The areas of activity involving ( dubious practice ed) in public office, surround the granting of development/building permission on lands acquired very fortuitously by council officials and to be fair some past councillors in the planning process activities.
Our local authority is not unique, as I am sure you know.
Reply I repeat all are innocent until found guilty. You should not throw allegations around without clear evidence which you should send to the prosecuting authorities. Best to do that in private to avoid mistakes and libels. I have no knowledge of any Council fraud. Plenty of knowledge of wasteful and less desirable spending.
May 9, 2026
Here are a couple of headlines from my area:
(words left out Ed) four men charged in an investigation into allegations of financial irregularity. This has been under investigation for 10 years.(The case reported is not alleged Council fraud Ed)
More than £1.1M is believed to have been lost to fraud at Bolton Council since 2017 with most linked to “a single high-profile case”.( There are reports of a former Council official found guilty of a large benefits fraud Ed)
As you say, because accounts are hidden, fraud may only come to light when the administration changes.
May 9, 2026
I see someone in the country on a student visa is now elected to the Scottish parliament, tells you all you need to know about the mess the UK is in.
May 9, 2026
Ian gill
What?! That’s unbelievable! How on earth was he allowed to run?
May 9, 2026
Councillors (of whatever party) cannot be effectively accountable to the public unless Council Officers become fully accountable to Councillors which they in reality are not. Council Officers starving Councillors of relevant information is becoming worse and worse. It was bad enough even 50 years ago (when as a Councillor nearly 50 years ago I tried to get not only the publicly available secondary school GCE examination results but also a comparison with average 11+ results, now the testing at the end of primary schools so as to more accurately determine which schools had advanced their children’s education most and which had done so least which the then Deputy Education Director agreed would be a significant measure but which he told me the education department would ‘fight tooth and nail’ against revealing even to Councillors). Last month I looked at Hyndburn’s (where a friend was standing for Council and fortunately was elected on Thursday) publicly available supposedly detailed accounts to see how much they were spending on their bin collection service, a figure that was available in previous years in other Council’s such as Bury, Trafford and Burnley budget books that I had looked at in the past. However neither the figure nor the number of people employed in that function was this year available in Hyndburn’s figures. It was buried within a very large combined figure for 5 major functions and thus could not be determined. I then looked at the Officers’ report to the Executive for the meeting to determine the Council Tax and could not find any more detailed figures there when they presented their budget to Councillors. Hyndburn Council has in the recent past been supposedly run by both Labour and by a Conservative led coalition. However it was apparent the only people ever really running the Council were the Council Officers as the Councillors were not being given the information necessary to question, let alone challenge how the Council Officers were running the Council. As for Councillors running or managing the Council, that is kept by the ‘professional’ Council Officers within the realm of fiction!
May 9, 2026
All the time Councils are being forced to fund the following, which are relentlessly increasing due to Government policies, they will find it very difficult (not impossible) to cut budgets:
1. SEND – and the ridiculous taxi to school service
2. Social housing for legal immigrants and in particular the criminal migrants
3. All the other “free stuff” the criminal migrants get when they’re moved out of hotels (paid for by Home Office) into HMOs (paid by Councils).
4. Retail and hospitality are being taxed to death by Two-Tier and Theeves, reducing Council income
2 years ago West Dorset changed from a Not-a-Conservative Council to a LibDem one. It pains me to say it, but it is being run better by the LibDems. For the first time since I moved here 10 years ago, roads are being repaired (properly, not just patched) and Council Tax increased by the same amount the Tories did every year – 5%.
Reply Rare case if a Lib Dem Council is mending roads instead of closing, blocking, damaging them. Government/ law lays down general requirements to provide the big services but Councils decide how much, what cost, who to employ and who is eligible so plenty of flex to run it well or badly.
May 9, 2026
1. It’s nonsense that children get a free taxi to school, and at the same time, parents receive money or a free car for the same purpose from the DWP. Our County Council has stopped the taxi service and purchased mini buses, but it still begs the question, why are taxpayers paying twice? I would also ask what disabilities these children have that require a taxi service? What has happened to this generation that has made them so sick and disabled? Is it just a case of “show me the incentive and I’ll show you the outcome”?
2. Our County Council is pulling out of the migrant resettlement scheme and putting our own homeless first.
3. Our County Council has stopped all the freebies.
Reply Please tell us which freebies are stopped and how they refuse to house homeless so others can learn what is legal
May 9, 2026
While I understand and accept the points you make. You could also ask Parliament what is the spend of the Government they hold to account (in other words the spend they authorise), and they wouldn’t know and would demonstrate they don’t care either – they just want to spend more and more on personal pet projects. It is as if the UK Parliament doesn’t have a job, they don’t hold the Executive to account and don’t make UK Laws (they borrow from elsewhere). Why are they even there? To spend money that the wouldn’t know were is came from.
The situation locally and overall is deliberately made cloudy as it is with national taxation. It’s been made deliberately convoluted so the real answer to any question is nothing more than a deflection
In the real World just as the hardworking people in the UK do daily, expenditure is related to what is earned. Some of us call that budgeting. In an ideal world local councils would be at the frontline of creating the earnings, no grants should come from central government in normal circumstance. Yes, that does mean local tax, but a tax from what is earned not dreamed up.
It’s a large subject deliberately made unnecessarily complicated to obscure the inabilities and incompetence of those empowered and paid to do the job. Any rational minded person can see that as we have tax on tax, surcharges, levies that are then taxed, then rebates and subsidies to offset the ‘wrong’ person paying. That means logically a vast amount of the tax collected is consumed in the convoluted administration of trying to hand some of the tax collected back.
Simplify, simplify, simplify, – of course that can’t happen the structure employees to many people.
Reply At least with central government the published figures do show very clearly total revenue and capital spend. MPs like spending lots under this government .
May 9, 2026
It should be a criminal offence for any civil servant to specifically the education Department should fund and control schools. Councils are in the loop for no reason but to confuse. There must be many more examples of this needless complexity.
May 9, 2026
On the bright side, voters across the country started to hold the Establishment to account for its destructive policies.
We are now paying £100 billion in so-called Renewable Energy Subsidies. “There was never any democratic mandate for any of this. At no stage were the public consulted, never mind given the opportunity to vote on renewable energy policy, Ed Miliband’s 2008 Climate Change Act or Theresa May’s suicidal Net Zero law.”
Reform has promised to stop Net Stupid Zero. Now they control Essex and Suffolk County Councils (largest party in Norfolk) plus Lincolnshire and several District Council on the eastern seaboard hopefully they’ll be able to, at the very least, slow down Red Ed’s planned destruction of our countryside with the windmill and solar panel blight.
https://dailysceptic.org/2026/05/08/renewables-obligation-subsidies-top-100-billion/
May 9, 2026
Shouldn’t the miniter for local goverrnment produce guidance to councillors …..or do local government officers get in the way
May 9, 2026
This issue of hiding the figures is an important one.
Even locally in Wokingham, we see farms being turned over to proposed solar farm with unknown compensation, unknown startup costs. We’re de facto shareholders as Council tax payers, We deserve to know the figures but seemingly people just keep voting here to be kept in the dark.
May 9, 2026
Doesn’t the problems and woes of the Nation come from the top? There are many situation too many to list here but if extrapolate the odd one and trickle that down, surely Local Councils are just following the lead they get from the UK Parliament?
According to some their election failure was due to TwoTierKier. But surely, he was AWOL being the Global Statesman that Labour says he is. Creating deals on the global stage, stopping ‘wars and so on. So local situations are not him.
Then on the secrecy front. 2TK is having private secret meetings with the EU, that he can’t talk about because the deal is not yet done. Then yesterday a major EU Party said the UK would be welcomed back in the EU. We need to be reminded 2TK has a ‘Plan’ that he needs to complete. The UK came under EU control last time around not by a national vote but because the Parliamentary Leadership wanted in – there was no Brexit style vote just a leadership desire. The People of the UK are just ‘fodder’
Is any of that any different to local councils shenanigans?
The fault lines in the country , the way it is ruled and not governed, all stem from the top
Reply No, No,No. This is an abnegation of responsibility for Councils, Quangos, nationalised industries who all have independent powers and budgets which we need to make them account for.
May 9, 2026
Good points; what is the easiest access to Council accounts ?
Reply Each Council website usually publishes the annual budget book after budget approval.
May 9, 2026
Excellent insights here Sir John from your experience as a County Councillor into how the local government officials can pluck any combination of numbers out of the hat and bamboozle most folk, even some accountants not familiar with the grants and other bureaucratic processes made even more complicated by cumulative dictats in recent decades.
As you say asking follow up simple questions would turn the tables on them as most of them are non financial by default in the Public Sector from my experience and have little incentive to reduce costs unless they have bonus linked salaries. The outsourced Private Sector Refuse collection service locally is driven literally by productivity by comparison. Like Night and Day!
May 9, 2026
This is all depressingly familiar. They all collude in the lie that a decrease in the rate of an increase is a cut, or a decrease in a planned increase.
I am worried the 13 Gazan independents in Birmingham (the 14th, a convicted terrorist, was rejected) may burgeon into a Home Rule for Birmingham movement.
May 9, 2026
That’s it then all sorted – “Mr Brown, the Labour prime minister from 2007 to 2010, will become the Government’s special envoy on global finance in an effort to boost “the country’s security and resilience”.
The man whose debts we are still all paying for, the man who destroyed private pensions, the man that sold gold at a loss, the man that said there is no future for nuclear power in the UK to advise on how to punish the People more.
The next move is to rejoin the EU. As that discussion will only ever be 2TK’s and Parliaments it’s a done deal.
Another 3 years of this nightmare all stitched up by a secret political cabal
May 9, 2026
Where did the local councils get the idea that the ‘People’ of the UK will have no say?
May 9, 2026
Seems so he will concentrate on Scorched Earth and Gerrymandering I expect just as he tried to cancel many of these local elections.
Looking at the elections results I see that the Blair/Brown botched devolution did nothing for Labour votes in Scotland or Wales just as I would have told them at the time. Two Tier Kier’s evil pandering to the Muslim Votes had done nothing for Labour either – they either vote Green or will have their own full Muslim parties.
May 9, 2026
One of the problems is that Council Tax is only levied on the main house holder; the great bulk of the population does not have to pay anything and has no reason to care about how the money gets spent. This must be a major reason for low turn out in local authority elections. The so called Poll Tax, or Community Charge, was an attempt to get over this and it is a great pity it was not better sold so that it did not need to be changed. My feeling at the time was in fact that it was already becoming yesterday’s problem, and if John Major had been half a person he would not have abolished it.
May 9, 2026
We must make it a criminal offence for Civil servants to fail to fully inform elected representatives.
Councillors are battling a wall of disimformation and confusion deliberately constructed to nullify them.
Off topic but it is 9th May. Victory Day celebrations in Russia and we have an interest. We were part of that victory and salute our Allies, The USA and USSR now Russian Federation.
The USSR destroyed 80% of the Nazi armies in World War I!
It paid for this result with 26 million dead,
70,000 villages and 1,710 cities destroyed!
Hemingway said, we can only express eternal gratitude to those who gave us the greatest gift, freedom!
May 9, 2026
Liberation day in the Channel Islands too.
On May 8, 1945 (VE Day), Winston Churchill announced the liberation of the Channel Islands, stating: “…and our dear Channel Islands are also to be freed today”. This signalled the end of five years of brutal German occupation, with liberation officially occurring on May 9, 1945, when British forces arrived.
May 9, 2026
Harriet Harman, as Minister for Women and Equality, introduced the Equality Act 2010, a landmark piece of UK legislation that consolidated over 100 separate anti-discrimination laws into a single Act. It strengthens protections against discrimination, advances equality of opportunity, and mandates transparency in the workplace to tackle pay gaps.
This moronic act has bankrupted Birmingham by letting judges rather than the market decide on what is work of equal value. How can one be a Minister for Women and Equality surely you are for equality or for women not both.
May 9, 2026
Both is a clear conflict of interests!