Tory council leader blasts chancellor Rishi Sunak over his 'crude' tax rebate scheme

Sean Woodward, leader of Fareham Borough Council criticised the chancellor’s measures while discussing the authority’s finance strategy at yesterday’s executive meeting.

Mr Sunak announced measures last Thursday to address sharply rising energy bills after Ofgem raised the price cap for an average tariff by £693 – one measure guarantees a rebate of £150 for council taxpayers in bands A to D.

But Councillor Sean Woodward slammed the Tory MP’s plan and claimed it would not help people struggling to pay their bills.

‘I’ve had to explain to quite a lot of residents that contrary to what was actually announced which was a council tax discount, there is no council tax discount,’ he said.

‘All that’s going to be happening is the council tax list will be used to give £150 in the banks of 35,000 households in this borough who are in council tax bands A to D it will have no effect on anyone's bill whatsoever.

‘We will receive a correct £5m of what's called a Section 31 grant to pay for that so it’s nothing to do with council tax – it’s a use of the council tax list as a very crude instrument to be able to hand out £150 to everybody in bands A to D.

‘We’re also going to be getting a discretionary amount of money as well which we can allocate to people who might be in particular hardship in bands E to H.’

During questioning, Cllr Ian Bastable asked what the process is for determining the discretionary spending.

In reply, Cllr Woodward said: ‘At the moment nobody’s had any sight of anything although presumably, the chancellor knows what he’s going to say about it.

‘I imagine they haven’t even thought about how they are going to do it because it was all a bit clunky the way the announcement got made, first it was a discount of council tax bills then within hours it wasn't.

‘It’s going to be a huge logistic operation just to deal with paying £150 to 35,000 council tax households.

‘Council tax records were chosen as the method to distribute in inverted commas free money, of course, we will all pay for it one way or another.’

A message from the Editor, Mark Waldron

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