Labour's Great Council Tax Swindle

How Labour's forcing councils to mug their own residents to pay for Westminster's mistakes

Photo by Jake Willett on Unsplash

You have to hand it to Rachel Reeves. It takes a special kind of brass neck to stand at the dispatch box, proclaim you're fixing the foundations, then systematically transfer the bill for your spending splurge onto the poorest households in Britain. But that's precisely what Wednesday's Spending Review achieved—a masterclass in political sleight of hand straight from the back of Del Boy's three-wheeler.

Here's the wheeze: announce "additional funding" for councils with great fanfare, conveniently forgetting to mention that the vast majority of this miraculous money materialises only if councils jack up their council tax by the maximum 5% every single year. It's rather like me announcing I'm giving you a pay rise, then revealing you'll need to mug your grandmother to collect it.

For Durham—that forgotten corner of England that once powered the Industrial Revolution but now barely merits a footnote in Westminster's calculations—this cynical game hits particularly hard. When 83% of your properties languish in the lowest council tax bands (compared to 65% nationally), every percentage increase raises less money while hammering residents who can least afford it. It's the fiscal equivalent of trying to squeeze blood from a stone, except the stone used to be coal and it built this bloody country.

The numbers are stark. Durham County Council faces a £33 million black hole next year. We've already burned through £73 million of reserves since 2022. And what's Westminster's solution? "Raise your council tax, peasants, or watch your grannies go without care and your special needs kids go without support." It's political blackmail dressed up as devolution.

But here's what really sticks in the craw: every major spending pressure crushing local councils stems from decisions made in Whitehall. National pay awards, minimum wage increases, and—the pièce de résistance—Reeves's National Insurance raid that'll cost Durham millions more without a penny of compensation. It's taxation without representation, 21st-century style.

Meanwhile, Reeves finds billions to throw at Mad Miliband's green delusions—heat pumps nobody wants, electric cars nobody can afford, and net zero targets that'll bankrupt what's left of British industry. But when it comes to helping families who can't pay their energy bills, young people priced out of home ownership, or parents who can't get their kids into local schools because migrants are being dumped in our communities like darts thrown at a board? Nothing. Zilch. Do one.

The SEND crisis deserves special mention in this catalogue of incompetence. Durham's staring down the barrel of a £36 million deficit, part of a £3 billion national time bomb set to detonate next March. The government's response? They'll "support councils transition to a reformed system" in some future consultation. Translation: we haven't got a clue what to do, so here's some warm words while you sink into insolvency.

This is precisely why Reform's new administration in Durham is embracing the DOGE agenda—stripping back the bloat, cutting the waste, focusing on doing fewer things better. We're determined not to increase council tax on people already struggling to keep their heads above water. But Labour's instinct is always to preserve the administrative apparatus while frontline services wither. They'd rather fund diversity coordinators than dustbin collections, sustainability officers than social care.

The bitter irony is that Labour still trades on its image as the party of working people and forgotten communities. Tell that to the former mining towns of County Durham, now expected to cough up ever more council tax to fund their own abandonment. These are communities that literally fuelled Britain's rise to greatness, reduced to begging for crumbs from a London-centric government that views them as little more than cash cows.

What we're witnessing is the slow-motion collapse of local government finance, accelerated by a Chancellor who thinks she can fool people with accounting tricks. Announce the headline, bury the detail, and hope nobody notices that your "increased funding" is actually a tax rise by another name.

The residents of County Durham—and similar forgotten corners of Britain—won't forget this betrayal. They're being asked to pay more for less, to subsidise their own decline, to fund decisions they had no part in making. It's a swindle, pure and simple. And when the bills land on doormats next April (which Reform Councils are working daily to avoid), when council tax soars while services crumble, when the SEND deficit bomb finally explodes, we'll see whether voters are as gullible as Rachel Reeves clearly thinks they are.

My money's on them not being fooled twice. After all, fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, and I might just vote Reform.