Bank Gardens berries

I wandered around town doing a few chores after which I spent a few minutes looking at Bank Gardens. Since I stopped being a councillor in the spring the Town Council has agreed to take over the ownership of Bank Gardens from the District Council. The reasons for this, and other 'asset transfers', as they are described by officialdom, are financial and I worry what the wider impact will be on the council, its budgets and the people of the parish who will have to fund it from now on.

I was standing in the churchyard beside the Gardens to take this view, and the church is going through a massive upheaval, whereby the building is likely to become another community space in order to generate funds for its upkeep.  This will put it into competition with the Town Council's Lansdown Hall, which sits just to the right of this picture on the lower edge of Bank Gardens. I have spent the last six years chairing the council's management group which has been renovating the Hall as the town's community venue. It is going to be much harder now to raise the necessary sums to complete the final stage of that renovation. 

I fear many of the problems for owners of older treasured local buildings in a community are stemming from the gradual shift of financial support away from central government on to local communities. This is a deliberate part of the rather insidious shift of taxation from income tax to local taxes. It will make central government look good to cut back on expenditure, but the cost will hit people who have no other ways of funding these responsibilities than by raising local taxes instead.  The government then legislates so that the local government increases to their local taxation are capped at about 2%. An example would be that if such a rise in council tax was requested by a council above 2%, then they must hold a referendum of the local people in that parish, which that council must pay for. To pay for it they would then have to raise the total council tax by 5% just to cover the cost of the referendum. I gather that a 2% rise in council tax in our parish would be equal to about 5p per household per week. I fear this is madness, which many people are not aware is happening.

I have recently heard that many urban areas where there are no parish councils are being encouraged to set them up. This will add an even greater burden to local taxation at the lowest level. I wonder where this will lead us.