Tony Travers
speaker
26 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Tony Travers’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
The leaflet that the council sent out is very carefully written.
So the leaflet talks about the council freezing...
its share of the council tax, but then goes on to talk about a so-called social care precept, which the council is allowed to put up, the government allows it to put it up, within the capping rules that central government sets for local authorities in England each year.
Why is adult social care being broken out here?
Well, because a few years ago it was realised by central government that the pressure they put on council budgets was such that social care was effectively massively underfunded.
So the government allowed councils not only to put up council tax by, say, 3% a year, but 3% plus 2, with the extra 2% being to fund social care.
The truth is, if you look at it in the round, what they are doing is putting the council tax up by 2%.
But they're disguising the way they say it in the language they're using in the document that they send out.
I mean, this strikes me as...
But I mean, it's truth.
It's true that I think it would be very easy to read this document and be misled.
that the council tax as a whole wasn't going up by 2% for one share of it.
And it would have been easy to say that the council tax is going up by 2%, which is less than the 5% we could have put it up by, because they could have put it up by the full 5%.
And we still have the lowest council tax in England.
But they've worded it in a way that, you know, in the end has made the listener worried.
Yeah.
Well, they said they've frozen it and they haven't.
They haven't frozen it at all.
They put it up, in effect, by 2%.
But the way it's written, you might think they'd frozen it and some other component was going up by 2%.
Showing 1–20 of 26 · page 1 of 2
Next →