Brent Council recently signed a deal with Crapita Business Services for council tax and business rates administration and IT support systems. Reported to be worth £15m over 5 years, the function of the contract is to increase the council tax collection rate, with Crapita giving a guaranteed a collection rate for council tax and an anticipated £4.6 million in savings for the Council over the initial term of the contract.

The Council General Purposes Committee recently set the 2011/12 collection rate for council tax at 97.5%, as it has been since 2001/02. As you can see, in recent years there is still a considerable way to go to reach 97.5% and apart from 2009/10 the collection is still considerably short of the 97.5%
target.

Let’s hope the arrangement with Crapita can squeeze out the extra 2% that Brent Council can’t quite manage. I wonder what the collection rate guarantee for council tax is… and if its 97.5% or greater…

Figures on page 6 of Public Document Pack downloaded from Agenda and minutes pages of General Purposes Committee Tuesday, 25 January 2011 7.00 pm.

This local red top was delivered in late February. It leads with the news of the Liberal Democrats delivering a “hammer blow” to Labour” in Dunfermline by-election.

The national political story was the continued opposition to the ID card legislation by Sarah Teather and the Liberal Democrats. The newsletter also covered the story of the comments made by Labour Cllr Jonathan Davies on the ‘consultation’ over the Queen’s Park Tower plans.

The two other key stories are the rehousing of Willesden Market following a successful campaign by the W&BT that Sarah Teather has supported and another highlughting Sarah’s long standing commitment to local healthcare provission with a story about her support for the  closure threatened Wembley Minor Accident Treatment Service.

“the lib dems stand up for us” ? well it is a Brent Lib Dem flyer… this flyer arrived in either late Feb or early March – the trail started early for the BELD team.

The update lacks focus – there are a lot of different things crammed ontoa doublesided sheet of A4. Quality of life/local environment make the agenda again – also mentioned is that the lib dems want to focus council tax receipts on public services, sports facilities and public toliets – with disabled access? a wooful lack of disabled access public toilets in Brent and London as a whole! – rather than the wasting of money on “glossy publications” such as the Brent Magazine and the Ward Working leaflets. I’ve got a Ward Working for Mapesbury to post as well… as waste of money? well, it gives Onyx the recycling contractor something to collect. i wonder what percentage of Brents waste – as a whole – the council is responsible for the creation of? anyway……

also in early march I received the Liberal Democrat Focus On…Mapesbury newsletter. This newsletter was the first opportunity to meet the Lib Dem candidates for the Mapesbury wards. The candidates are Chris Leaman, Sami Hashmi and Hayley Matthews.

The BELDs expect that a Labour council would again increase council taxes significantly after the local elections. The LDs (as we know) propose a ‘fairer system’ of local income taxation.

Local education and student finance also make an appearence in the newsletter. Sarah Teather has been consistantly raising the issue of numbers of school places in the House of Commons. And the Lib Dems have been against tuition fees, as highlighted by Hayley Matthews.

The newsletter also draws our attention to a number of quality of environment / quality of life issues that the BELD have been responding to in the Mapesbury area.