House prices and taxes

chris_spackman

Cleaver wrote: »

That was even less interesting the second time around.

Why such a negative response from you. Was there a need to be so rude in your reply? It might not be interesting to you but to me , well i have strong feelings on the issue.

I am fed up as i am sure lots of others are with the amount of tax we have to pay, in a time when people are struggling to pay bills etc would a drop in the amount of council tax not be a good idea.

Both myself and my girlfriend have lost our jobs and are doing all we can to get another job. It kills me to hear of my council spending £2m on adverts and all the rest that they chuck money at.

I called my council and explained the situation and the response i got was' Your council tax needs to be paid BEFORE anything else. If you can't afford to pay then we will wait for you to default then issue you with a court summons'

Well thank you very much Bournemouth Council, a very understanding reply.

It is always the hard working element who are taxed to their eye balls that suffer in times like these.

chris_spackman

Cleaver wrote: »

You've twisted my words to somehow say that I feel MPs are 'worth' the job they do. Whether specific MPs are worth the money is a separate debate that I haven't really commented on. My argument is that large, complex public sector organisations are similar beasts to large private sector organisations (albeit easier in some ways to run but more difficult in others) and that their leaders and senior directors need to be paid a salary that is in line with market prices. Otherwise you'd have a much higher proportion of incompetent people doing very important and difficult jobs.

Your posts are like some of the others on here: they just sound like badly written Daily Mail opinion articles.

Maybe you can answer my question I've asked a few times. Chris Spackman is elevated to a position where he gets to decide how the city of Birmingham is run. So what are your plans as to how to structure a group of senior people to run the city? What would you pay them? Would you have a chief exec? How would you stop the problem you talk about of councils 'not being answerable to anyone'?

Who are you to say that anyones opinion is bad?

beingjdc

chris_spackman wrote: »

Who are you to say that anyones opinion is bad?

He didn't say it was bad. He said it was badly written, and that he thought it was wrong. He asked you a question to see if you would elaborate on why you think what you think, but you haven't done so. You have, however, cut and pasted the same little speech about BlairBrownBoomBustWar three times now, once in an old thread, once as its own thread, and once in this thread.

Come on, a bit of variety at least!

chris_spackman

Cleaver wrote: »

You've twisted my words to somehow say that I feel MPs are 'worth' the job they do. Whether specific MPs are worth the money is a separate debate that I haven't really commented on. My argument is that large, complex public sector organisations are similar beasts to large private sector organisations (albeit easier in some ways to run but more difficult in others) and that their leaders and senior directors need to be paid a salary that is in line with market prices. Otherwise you'd have a much higher proportion of incompetent people doing very important and difficult jobs.

Your posts are like some of the others on here: they just sound like badly written Daily Mail opinion articles.

Maybe you can answer my question I've asked a few times. Chris Spackman is elevated to a position where he gets to decide how the city of Birmingham is run. So what are your plans as to how to structure a group of senior people to run the city? What would you pay them? Would you have a chief exec? How would you stop the problem you talk about of councils 'not being answerable to anyone'?

Just say that those fat cats in the council are told that they will have to take a pay cut and they walked away from their job that would say something. It should not be about money but about what difference they want to make to our and their own towns / city or lives. people risk life and limb for others, walk the streets handing out blankets etc to the homeless and ask for nothing in return. But council workers should get lots of money for doing nothing near as good as that.

mewbie_2

chris_spackman wrote: »

But council workers should get lots of money for doing nothing near as good as that.

Do you think they should? I don't.

Cleaver

chris_spackman wrote: »

Why such a negative response from you. Was there a need to be so rude in your reply? It might not be interesting to you but to me , well i have strong feelings on the issue.

I am fed up as i am sure lots of others are with the amount of tax we have to pay, in a time when people are struggling to pay bills etc would a drop in the amount of council tax not be a good idea.

Both myself and my girlfriend have lost our jobs and are doing all we can to get another job. It kills me to hear of my council spending £2m on adverts and all the rest that they chuck money at.

I called my council and explained the situation and the response i got was' Your council tax needs to be paid BEFORE anything else. If you can't afford to pay then we will wait for you to default then issue you with a court summons'

Well thank you very much Bournemouth Council, a very understanding reply.

It is always the hard working element who are taxed to their eye balls that suffer in times like these.

I'm really sorry to hear you've both lost your jobs and hope you find something soon. I don't really understand what it has to do with a council spending £2 million on advertising though (do you have a source for that by the way?).

I feel like I'm kicking you when you are down, but what did you think the Council would say when you asked if you still needed to pay your council tax?

I'm pretty happy with the service I get from my council. Our council tax is around 2.5% of our joint gross income and for that we get a pretty good service from them. The head of Manchester City Council is on around 180k I believe and has been in post over 10 years. Under his leadership he's pretty much turned the city around by regenerating areas, attracting businesses back to the city and helping the city to host events such as the Commenwealth games. I think he deserves his salary really. I was reading an article recently about the Chief Exec of Manchester Airport who apparently earns nearly half a million pounds a year. I think I know which job is a lot easier than the other.

beingjdc

chris_spackman wrote: »

Just say that those fat cats in the council are told that they will have to take a pay cut and they walked away from their job that would say something. It should not be about money but about what difference they want to make to our and their own towns / city or lives.

Again, you're confusing the staff with the politicians. The staff are there for a career, and to make a living. Sure, lots of us go into it because we believe we're doing more good than we probably would if we'd become bankers, consultants, corporate lawyers, or any of the other people who came round begging at graduate recruitment fares, but I wouldn't stay in my job long if I was told I was getting a 75% pay cut, and I doubt a Council Chief Executive would either.

people risk life and limb for others, walk the streets handing out blankets etc to the homeless and ask for nothing in return. But council workers should get lots of money for doing nothing near as good as that.

Now you're confusing people's jobs with charity volunteering... I don't get the point. For all you know, lots of council workers might do charity work in their spare time too. An A&E nurse has a far harder job than a GP, but one of them earns more, just like a judge earns more than a coal miner.

It's not about how dangerous or stressful your job is - lots of the lowest paid jobs are the most dangerous and stressful - it's about the skills, qualifications, and experience required to do it well, the outcomes of having it done badly, and the amount of people interested in doing it compared to the number of vacancies.

chris_spackman

Cleaver wrote: »

I'm really sorry to hear you've both lost your jobs and hope you find something soon. I don't really understand what it has to do with a council spending £2 million on advertising though (do you have a source for that by the way?).

I feel like I'm kicking you when you are down, but what did you think the Council would say when you asked if you still needed to pay your council tax?

I'm pretty happy with the service I get from my council. Our council tax is around 2.5% of our joint gross income and for that we get a pretty good service from them. The head of Manchester City Council is on around 180k I believe and has been in post over 10 years. Under his leadership he's pretty much turned the city around by regenerating areas, attracting businesses back to the city and helping the city to host events such as the Commenwealth games. I think he deserves his salary really. I was reading an article recently about the Chief Exec of Manchester Airport who apparently earns nearly half a million pounds a year. I think I know which job is a lot easier than the other.

I did not ask if i still have to pay, i am not expecting them to say don't pay it but i was expecting some form of i don't know...... help, a pointer in the right direction. The council tried to defend it on the tv and the local rag with regards to the £2m. this is my point, we struggle and struggle but councils still see fit to hit us with rises year on year. When they spend money in this way it could be better spent somewhere else or stop wasting it and give us a little drop in the amount we pay. The amount of money a private firm pays it's staff is worlds apart from our money which these councils pay theimselves with.

beingjdc

Cleaver wrote: »

I'm really sorry to hear you've both lost your jobs and hope you find something soon. I don't really understand what it has to do with a council spending £2 million on advertising though (do you have a source for that by the way?).

Bournemouth do spend about that on "publicity", but to call it advertising is a bit misleading. It's not £2 million on posters saying "Bournemouth Council is amazing".

It's things like job adverts (legally required to advertise publicly though personally these days I think we should just put most stuff on the website and screw the papers), statutory planning notices so people know if someone has applied for planning permission, posters reminding people of the cut-off date for getting on the electoral register, leaflets (required by government in fact, for all people whinge about them I think they're good in principle) with council tax bills explaining how it's spent, and resident newsletters (which from my memory of seeing them in Bournemouth are full of adverts for local restaurants, but we're on gross spend here, so it will look like a big number even if the actual thing turns a profit).

Bournemouth's number still looks high by comparison with other similar sized authorities. I think, but haven't been able to check, that this is because their "advertising" budget includes their tourist and conference marketing work, which I would bet brings in well over £2 million in business and jobs to the town anyway.

Edit - just thought of a good example - leaflets for parents on what schools they can apply to send their children to, and how to fill in the forms. Technically, that's under the 'publicity' budget. Hardly "advertising", though, is it!

Cleaver

chris_spackman wrote: »

Just say that those fat cats in the council are told that they will have to take a pay cut and they walked away from their job that would say something. It should not be about money but about what difference they want to make to our and their own towns / city or lives. people risk life and limb for others, walk the streets handing out blankets etc to the homeless and ask for nothing in return. But council workers should get lots of money for doing nothing near as good as that.

(sigh)

That's just a silly arguement. Let's say a Council decides that it wants to implement an online payements system for its' residents that is fully integrated with their accounts and reporting systems. The business case predicts that it will bring big benefits for the residents using the system and it's something they have asked for. It will also save the council 'x' amount of money over the next ten years to be spent on other services. So it gets the green light. They need various new skilled people to get this off the ground: technical project manager, software architects, developers etc.

So you'd advertise these positions with a line saying 'we won't pay you, do it for the good of your community'? No, you'd advertise them with a salary that was at the market rates for the jobs. We're long past the age where there is some divide between private and public sector and many flow between the two throughout their career and they expect the appropriate salaries.

If you could repsond to this in a reasoned way rather than cliches about 'fat cats' I'd be grateful.