Yesterday I stood at my local bus stop at Plymouth Railway Station. Or rather, the absence of the bus stop. Alongside college students travelling to Kings Road, the sick and elderly to Derriford Hospital, forces personnel heading for Drake, we have all been used to shelter from the wind and rain, and seating. It’s all gone, leaving not even a signpost. 

50 bus shelters have been removed in order to cut the maintenance costs. Their removal made me wonder at the sheer and visible poverty of Plymouth City Council.

What has gone wrong, badly wrong, is the result of decades of under-funding alongside ideological attacks against so-called “municipal socialism”.

Continuous attacks have included government cuts and directives such as the Private Finance Initiative that have put councils as well as hospitals and schools into hock, enforcing privatisation with all the added costs incurred by increasing loan and interest payments, and wholesale transfer of services to external businesses who insist on high profit margins. 

Councils today have a quarter of the spending power of 60 years ago, and a fifth of the assets – our collective property paid by universal taxation has all been sold off. 

Just in the last decade, government grants to local councils have been cut by more than 40%, pushing increases to council tax and cutting councils’ spending by at least a third.

This is not an argument for higher Council Tax. Quite the opposite, we should demand that central Government gives back the trillions of pounds robbed, and a positive politic that prioritises social welfare.

The Council Tax system shares many features of the previous Poll Tax with its gross inequalities between poor and rich households and only a “very weak link” to property values. In fact, it is highly regressive, the small gap between bands causing many of us living in low value tenancies to be paying proportionately five times more than someone living in a multi-million pound house. 

The charges to those on benefits have also created significant injustices: debt, prosecutions for the “crime” of being too poor to pay-up, and court-imposed extra charges. 

This must all change. We need a sliding scale of taxation that represents household income and capital wealth. The less you can afford the less you should have to pay towards the common good, and vice versa. This would redistribute rather than raise the tax burden, relieve the poor and generate billions of pounds more in tax to be invested in renewing council services. 

Over the decades the private businesses have lobbied successfully to privatise services for them to  the tax-cash. And of course, the contractors and property speculators have become Councillors in order to direct the cash flow away from the common good and into private pockets.

So now we can’t afford bus shelters or trees, sufficient care homes or child protection services, decent roads and pavements, and can’t pay the wages of the workers who used to care for them. Crucially, the essential services and adaptations needed to protect against extreme weather events, shelters from the heatwaves and flash flooding, cold snaps and power outages expected as climate change accelerates, will remain without funds. 

We elect the Councillors who are supposed to represent and advocate for our needs. But who or what do they represent? Successive councillors should have been relentlessly challenging successive governments, and campaigning for proper funding,  defying the government cuts. Instead, they have rolled with the punches, cut after cut after cut, in return for meagre privileges and Empire medals. Who now honestly advocates for the services we need?

Tony Staunton

President, Plymouth Trades Union Council