Tory pledge to reduce inheritance tax is most welcome - Carl Les

The party conferences have run their course, grabbing headlines for public attention, but with some detail for different groups including local government. The real impact comes from the party in government, in the coming Budget, and the anticipated local government settlement that follows.

This settlement comprising hundreds of pages of detail is promised, once again, to be announced earlier than previously, a week or so before the day before Christmas Eve, when the civil service goes on leave. For once we can digest its impact before we digest the turkey.

Members of the council received a briefing last week about our present financial position, and a year end forecast before we start to consider in detail the work that is needed in setting our budgets next spring. Work on this doesn’t just start now, in fact I say each year that the work on next year’s budget starts the day after we set the present one. Certainly performance management, including financial management, is ongoing, relentlessly, as it should be in any business setting.

Our net revenue budget is approaching £800m, and although we have budgeted savings of £34m in the current year, our in-year shortfall is still forecast presently to be £17m. Increases in demand are not unique to North Yorkshire, and some increases in costs such as National Insurance increases are national ones, other increases like fuel are due to world events.

All our teams have been charged with identifying the local causes of the overspends, and coming up with ways to reduce or mitigate rising demand, for example increasing our in-house provision in childrens’ services which will avoid paying very high fees to other providers, and investing in Care & Support Hubs for vulnerable adults.

We have repeated often enough the financial pressures this government has put on rural councils, £20m due to the detrimental to us Fair Funding review, the £15m hit with the loss of Rural Services Grant. The settlement is likely to reinforce bad news in loss of funding for area cost adjustment, roads at height, flooding. New government priorities like defence will impact on local government funding.

Any government settlement is predicated on our ‘core spending power’ being maximised by raising Council Tax by 4.99 per cent. Each 1 per cent of CT represents £5m, so any decrease through political choice widens the gap. One thing is clear, we will not apply for ‘exceptional financial support’.

A civilised society accepts that there must be some taxation on all to provide services for all, and in some cases for a specific chosen few. This is about political choice, setting and delivering priorities. The real debate is about the level, and what is taxed, with many different opinions. Amongst many statements and commitments from all parties I was particularly pleased to see my party pledge to reduce inheritance tax.

Apparently this is the most unpopular tax of all, even by people who do not pay it, although with inflation, especially of house prices, it is likely that more will be caught in its net. Flawed in principle as it is a tax levied on assets that have been accumulated whilst being subject to taxation, it is flawed also in practice.

It will often mean the disposal of key assets that make up a viable business, as it frequently will with family farms, or a significant reduction in viability that neuters a business until the tax is paid, so limiting employment, investment, and sustainability that all generate more taxation. I speak with experience of this neutering of a business. Removing the family home is a good first step. Removing barriers to family businesses must follow.

It is impossible to write anything this week without making reference to the proposed execution by firing squad of US Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan. There is no doubt that some people, and Malik Hasan is one, in committing grievous crimes show such little regard for human life that they sit outside norms of civilised behaviour and deserve extreme punishment, to stop them repeating the offence, and to act as a deterrent.

In most civilisations we have moved beyond capital punishment, but it is for each country to debate the merits of that, and arrive at its own position. That is the right of the Americans to choose, although the botched attempts at two lethal injections for Rosa Pike must question the process. That this execution should be live-streamed is most disturbing, made more so by its promotion by the self-styled Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, a former TV presenter.

He has been largely invisible for some time, probably because his Commander in Chief’s ill-timed, ill-planned war with Iran has done nothing but inflame tensions in the Middle East and increase oil prices to a point where the world economy is suffering. And his boss will now remove sanctions on Russian oil to help his party’s mid-term elections by reducing diesel prices in the US by 4 per cent.

God help Ukraine! That Hegseth chooses this time and way to burst back into the bright lights is alarming. America deserves better public servants.

Coun Carl Les the Leader of North Yorkshire Council.