Right to be outraged over tax

3:20pm Friday 9th November 2001

Council Tax Rises for 2002/3.

Residents are right to be outraged at the prospect of Council Tax rises of 21% for next year.

When the Rate of Inflation, and consequently many residents' annual pay or index-linked pension rises, is hovering around 2% this kind of increase is simply inexplicable.

But certainly Bromley residents do deserve an explanation and perhaps we should look further back than June of this year, when the Conservative admini-stration took over, to find it.

We already know that the Labour/Liberal councillors who were running the finances until some four months ago were spending council tax-payers money with such abandon than even the Labour government were at-tempting to rein them in.

Surely it can come as no surprise then that the Labour/Liberal spending juggernaut is going to take some time to stop.

Many of the former administration's spontaneous and unbudgeted projects will require a consider-able financial commitment over a number of years. These costs cannot, unfortunately, be re-moved from the budget overnight. So, perhaps the real rea-son for this rate rise will be found in ex-amining the aston-ishing spending sprees that Bromley residents are being forced to sponsor because of earlier prom-ises from Labour/Liberal councillors.

Mrs J Stewart

Sandy Ridge

Chislehurst

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