Public sector bureaucrats pen-pushing the bills skywards

COUNCIL tax bills are rising faster than wages, faster than pensions and much faster than inflation. So what is going on and who is responsible?

Councils get most of their money from the Executive and top it up with council tax income.

The Executive blames the councils for rising council tax rates, saying that it has provided enough money to fund local services adequately and insisting that council tax rises could, and should, be lower if local authorities used their resources more wisely.

The councils, unsurprisingly, blame the Executive, arguing they cannot implement all the Executive’s policies and provide the local services people need without putting taxes up.

All this is being played out against a backdrop of the Executive enjoying huge amounts more money - the Scottish block grant has risen by 50 per cent in the last seven years.

Hard-pressed householders are entitled to ask where the money has gone.

The answer to the council tax conundrum is simple - the rise and rise of the public sector and, for this, both the councils and the Executive are to blame.

Labour went into the elections of 1997, 1999, 2001 and 2003 promising more teachers, nurses, doctors and police officers. The Executive has delivered on most of these promises but the new front-line workers have been accompanied by a corresponding, and untrumpeted, growth in administrators, bureaucrats and pen-pushers.

At the same time, the Executive has championed a series of generous pay deals which have helped push up the wages of public sector workers by 20 per cent in the last five years, outstripping the wages of those in the private sector.

The burgeoning size of the public sector in Scotland was confirmed yesterday by new figures showing an increase of 7,000 in local authority employees in Scotland in the last year alone, taking the total to more than 250,000. This double whammy of more workers and better public sector pay has eaten in to much of the extra money which the Executive has been given by the Treasury.

The councils have to find the money to pay for the new frontline public sector workers and the generous pay deals agreed by the Executive.

But they are responsible for getting a grip on the ever-expanding size of local government, something they appear to have failed to tackle.