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Comment by throw156754228 | Hacker News Reader

I really don't know what our London borough's council does outside of garbage collection and passing school applications over to schools. Weeds overgrown on every footpath, litter all over the place. Oh they mow the local football pitch every blue moon. I pay 2500 pounds a year.

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They should publish an annual report outlining the spend. You might be surprised at what they fund, or rather what central government doesn’t fund.

Nobody seems to sweep the roads or maintain the bike paths though.

Even as an accountant it is very hard to understand local authority accounts. They are usually three years late and poorly presented. Also most of their spend is either recharged to central government or mandatory; discretionary spend is a very small part of the budget.

By contrast, central government accounts in the UK are excellent.

So the local council has a shit tonne of things to payfor, but no real control on either raising taxes or defining how to deliver those services.

THey have a duty to:

provide social care (as in old people, homeless, disabled, orhpaned, etc)

Schooling (kinda)

large swathes of health care

planning

road maintenance

social housing

a whole bunch of red tape implementations.

However the actual execution is dictated by central government. Even the taxes you pay (council/buisness rates) are clawed back and redistributed. The local council has no real way to raise cash apart from cutting services, selling shit or risky investments.

The more I think about it the more I believe social care should be taken out of the hands of local councils. The demand for social care is effectively infinite, it will always crowd out other services.

yes. It needs national reform. It wont happen because its fucking expensive and a bit too socialist. (part of the reason May almost lost her majority was due to botched social care reform)

It seems to me, that May was more honest than most other politicians about social care reform, saying "if you want decent social care, let's not pretend it doesn't need paying for. Here's a proposal for how to fund it". Which IIRC included siphoning off some £ that would have otherwise been inherited, which to me seems reasonably fair, because getting much of an inheritance is a luxury that only a privileged portion of people receive. And in return the electorate said "f* off we're not paying". No wonder we're at a stalemate. Later, the Tories brought in the 1.5% social care levy on income. Which I throughly agree with as again, a reasonably fair way to fund this. Labour at the time opposed that claiming it was taxing the poorest. What does Labour want instead? More money in poor people's pockets but cr*p or non-existent social care instead? What's their proposal instead then? The social care levy lasted a few months before Truss ditched it. It seems to me the main parties have both failed miserably overall on social care and that they need to work together. Over the last few decades no gov't of either stripe has a decent record on it. Better that they make this non-partisan, de-politicise it, and agree not to fight each other's policies on it. Because at the mo' , people are having awful lives and dying of neglect (massive number of deaths of people with learning disability for example during covid), due to lack of funding for the sector. And the people working in the sector are getting paid less than supermarket staff and having to use food banks despite having full time jobs. And any person may at some time in their life need social care or someone they care about need it. Which is why is is staggeringly short-sighted of anyone to whinge about paying more tax to fund this. But that's apparently the position of the electorate as a whole. I despair in people, I really do.

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