Councils are very hard to understand. I heard on the radio this morning that 7 million actions have been taken this year by council bin-snoop police throughout the country, many resulting in income for said councils in the form of fines. One lady in the midlands was fined £50 for throwing a jam jar into her full paper-cardboard recycle bin. They should be glad she recycles anything, given the shameful way the residents of our apartment block carry on!
Yes, councils continually cry poverty, yet pay very senior staff a fortune (not the humble coal-face workers dealing with an often very-miffed public; I mean they pay a fortune to the ones with strings of meaningless letters after their name and who use just an initial and surname so you don't know whether they are a Mr, Mrs, Miss or a combination of all three. I mean, if you get a letter from "A Jobsworth" would you know whether they are a Mr, Mrs, Miss or a combination of all three?).
They come up with wonderful ideas such as wholesale traffic disruption (in Manchester, for examplr, Salford and Bury respectively having £800k to spare on the Great Clowes Street cycle-lane farce and £2million spare to turn Prestwich into the Kensington of the North). That's almost £3million available on barn-pot schemes no one actually wanted or welcomed).
They collect vast fortunes in council tax from areas with very small council-spend footprints (blocks of flats - e.g. 80 units at £1,000 a year). They also collect a further fortune from the likes of car-parking taxes (parking AND fines), taxi driver licensing, business rates and various business licenses. And if you want, for example, to put up scaffolding, use a cherry picker or obtain leisure function permissions, yes, you guessed, you have to pay the council for a license.
And then they wonder why, with a former mayor ["Gorgeous" George Galloway's bosom-buddy Lutfur Rahman - sheep of a fleece stick together] so crooked he used to have to come to work in a steam-press (prior to being banned for 5 years from holding public office) that Tower Hamlets council isn't taken seriously.
Yes, councils continually cry poverty, yet pay very senior staff a fortune (not the humble coal-face workers dealing with an often very-miffed public; I mean they pay a fortune to the ones with strings of meaningless letters after their name and who use just an initial and surname so you don't know whether they are a Mr, Mrs, Miss or a combination of all three. I mean, if you get a letter from "A Jobsworth" would you know whether they are a Mr, Mrs, Miss or a combination of all three?).
They come up with wonderful ideas such as wholesale traffic disruption (in Manchester, for examplr, Salford and Bury respectively having £800k to spare on the Great Clowes Street cycle-lane farce and £2million spare to turn Prestwich into the Kensington of the North). That's almost £3million available on barn-pot schemes no one actually wanted or welcomed).
They collect vast fortunes in council tax from areas with very small council-spend footprints (blocks of flats - e.g. 80 units at £1,000 a year). They also collect a further fortune from the likes of car-parking taxes (parking AND fines), taxi driver licensing, business rates and various business licenses. And if you want, for example, to put up scaffolding, use a cherry picker or obtain leisure function permissions, yes, you guessed, you have to pay the council for a license.
And then they wonder why, with a former mayor ["Gorgeous" George Galloway's bosom-buddy Lutfur Rahman - sheep of a fleece stick together] so crooked he used to have to come to work in a steam-press (prior to being banned for 5 years from holding public office) that Tower Hamlets council isn't taken seriously.
have a great day
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