Trams on the wrong track
It seems to have escaped everybody’s attention that if and when the Midland Metro line gets extended to Merry Hill, an entirely new tax will be invented to pay for it.
Centro – the Conservative-run transport body behind the scheme – claims the cost will be “only” £430 million for the Dudley route plus a short but chaos-creating tram line through the middle of Birmingham.
The Taxpayers’ Alliance claims the chances are that the cost will actually turn out to be nearer to £625 million by the time the lines are actually built.
And based on previous attempts by public bodies to build things on budget and on time, I reckon the Taxpayers’ Alliance may well be closer to the mark than the anti-car brigade at Centro.
Either way, it’s still an awful lot of money for a transport system which loses a fortune – the latest estimate I have heard is £3 million-a-year – and is actually losing passengers as well.
This paper revealed that passenger numbers were down by almost half a million.
Still, the transport experts at Centro won’t let the facts get in the way of a good way to spend public money that they haven’t got.
For them, the only real issue is how to get their hands on the money. And it is here that Gordon Brown is riding to their rescue with yet another stealth tax.
This tax will be proposed in a new Bill going to Parliament in the autumn (assuming, of course, that both Mr Brown and his Government survive in power that long).
They propose to introduce a “supplementary business rate”. This will be an extra tax imposed on all businesses adding up to as much as 10 per cent more than they are already forced to find on their rates.
Most of us, most of the time, don’t really care if businesses face high taxes. It doesn’t affect us and we don’t have to find the money.
But we do care if over-taxed businesses go bust and we do care when the price we have to pay for goods and services keep increasing.
Both of these things will happen when the next tax is imposed. It may also be the last straw for some companies which are already seriously thinking about moving abroad, where the taxes are lower.
The Republic of Ireland is one of the beneficiaries of this and will no doubt be rooting for the extra business tax in the hope that it can win more jobs from this country.
Businesses are already struggling with a recession in which the cost of paying rates has become a serious concern.
The law was changed in April so that if a business property – a shop, an office or a factory – remains empty and unused, the owner still has to pay rates on it.
That means a property which generates no income at all is costing the landlord a fortune in rates.
In some cases, that means owners are willing to offer their properties on short-term rent-free deals just to get the rates paid. In others, though, the owners are seriously thinking about tearing the buildings down altogether in order to avoid paying rates.
According to an insolvency expert in the Black Country I was talking to the other day, this is becoming more and more of a problem.
If we’re not careful, whole swathes of our inner cities will come to look like the bomb sites left over from the Second World War.
And what happens to all those brand new buildings being put up at the former car plant in Longbridge or in other regeneration areas across the region?
One public sector body – Advantage West Midlands – is putting up new buildings in the hope of bringing new life to an area. Another public body – the local council – is imposing huge costs on empty buildings.
Something has to give. The regeneration will stop. Places will continue to get demolished. Hopes of an early end to recession will recede.
And all this is being made much worse by the tax-grab from organisations like Centro which have no interest in the problems facing thousands of companies as they struggle to survive the economic down-turn.
Obviously a Metro extension will bring benefits and jobs to the companies involved in its construction. But at what price?
Of course, the Government isn’t imposing its new business tax just to pay for the Midland Metro. It’s doing so because then local authorities up and down the country can have eve more of our money to play with.
Businesses already pay £20 billion in rates. The Government wants to increase that by as much as £2 billion a year.
Most business people are too concerned with the day-to-day job of running their companies to have noticed this new threat to their prosperity.
People like those who run Centro, on the other hand, are rubbing their hands in anticipation of this new windfall tax – and they’re carefully calculating how much more they can borrow on the strength of all this loot.
We’ll probably end up with a shiny new Midland Metro extension. It’s just a pity all it will do is carry passengers from one industrial wasteland to another.
Centro – the Conservative-run transport body behind the scheme – claims the cost will be “only” £430 million for the Dudley route plus a short but chaos-creating tram line through the middle of Birmingham.
The Taxpayers’ Alliance claims the chances are that the cost will actually turn out to be nearer to £625 million by the time the lines are actually built.
And based on previous attempts by public bodies to build things on budget and on time, I reckon the Taxpayers’ Alliance may well be closer to the mark than the anti-car brigade at Centro.
Either way, it’s still an awful lot of money for a transport system which loses a fortune – the latest estimate I have heard is £3 million-a-year – and is actually losing passengers as well.
This paper revealed that passenger numbers were down by almost half a million.
Still, the transport experts at Centro won’t let the facts get in the way of a good way to spend public money that they haven’t got.
For them, the only real issue is how to get their hands on the money. And it is here that Gordon Brown is riding to their rescue with yet another stealth tax.
This tax will be proposed in a new Bill going to Parliament in the autumn (assuming, of course, that both Mr Brown and his Government survive in power that long).
They propose to introduce a “supplementary business rate”. This will be an extra tax imposed on all businesses adding up to as much as 10 per cent more than they are already forced to find on their rates.
Most of us, most of the time, don’t really care if businesses face high taxes. It doesn’t affect us and we don’t have to find the money.
But we do care if over-taxed businesses go bust and we do care when the price we have to pay for goods and services keep increasing.
Both of these things will happen when the next tax is imposed. It may also be the last straw for some companies which are already seriously thinking about moving abroad, where the taxes are lower.
The Republic of Ireland is one of the beneficiaries of this and will no doubt be rooting for the extra business tax in the hope that it can win more jobs from this country.
Businesses are already struggling with a recession in which the cost of paying rates has become a serious concern.
The law was changed in April so that if a business property – a shop, an office or a factory – remains empty and unused, the owner still has to pay rates on it.
That means a property which generates no income at all is costing the landlord a fortune in rates.
In some cases, that means owners are willing to offer their properties on short-term rent-free deals just to get the rates paid. In others, though, the owners are seriously thinking about tearing the buildings down altogether in order to avoid paying rates.
According to an insolvency expert in the Black Country I was talking to the other day, this is becoming more and more of a problem.
If we’re not careful, whole swathes of our inner cities will come to look like the bomb sites left over from the Second World War.
And what happens to all those brand new buildings being put up at the former car plant in Longbridge or in other regeneration areas across the region?
One public sector body – Advantage West Midlands – is putting up new buildings in the hope of bringing new life to an area. Another public body – the local council – is imposing huge costs on empty buildings.
Something has to give. The regeneration will stop. Places will continue to get demolished. Hopes of an early end to recession will recede.
And all this is being made much worse by the tax-grab from organisations like Centro which have no interest in the problems facing thousands of companies as they struggle to survive the economic down-turn.
Obviously a Metro extension will bring benefits and jobs to the companies involved in its construction. But at what price?
Of course, the Government isn’t imposing its new business tax just to pay for the Midland Metro. It’s doing so because then local authorities up and down the country can have eve more of our money to play with.
Businesses already pay £20 billion in rates. The Government wants to increase that by as much as £2 billion a year.
Most business people are too concerned with the day-to-day job of running their companies to have noticed this new threat to their prosperity.
People like those who run Centro, on the other hand, are rubbing their hands in anticipation of this new windfall tax – and they’re carefully calculating how much more they can borrow on the strength of all this loot.
We’ll probably end up with a shiny new Midland Metro extension. It’s just a pity all it will do is carry passengers from one industrial wasteland to another.
posted by nigel hastilow at 2:36 AM
2 Comments:
"The Taxpayers’ Alliance claims the chances are that the cost will actually turn out to be nearer to £625 million by the time the lines are actually built."
And what do these crackpots base this on? Their usual, let's-make-it-up-cos-none-of-the-bone-idle-journalists-will-care-or-check approach of, erm, making it up?
I ran a small family business in Birmingham which my father started in 1946, the business still survives but our family had to sell up as it was becoming impossible to carry on with the limited resources we had.
Each day I ran that business through both the end of the Tory years in Government, and then the start of the Labour take over, it was a never ending nightmare and extremely frustrating to boot.
The Ministers of both parties would tell how they were supporting small businesses, whilst in the real world those of us coping with the EU imposed crap they were forced to rubber stamp, would tell another tale.
In the middle of the early nineties recession rather than helping, the Government made things worse by increasing V.A.T. from the already high 15% to 17.5%. I sent a letter of complaint to the Chancellor asking for V.A.T. to be reduced to 10% or less and was told that the EU would not allow us to set V.A.T. below 15%!
Despite what they say, all governments of what ever political hue, hate small to medium sized businesses, all they do is introduce reams of EU inspired useless legislation that saps the will of any small businessman who eventually gives up in despair.
This new tax which will be imposed upon the business world will see off more SME’s and those that want to continue will pack their bags and take their businesses – and jobs, to where they feel welcome – which will be out of the EU altogether.
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