Monday 26 November 2012

Council Tax Benefits Crisis

Council tax benefit is changing and we have been consulting with local people about just what those changes may be. Currently Hastings Borough Council pays out over £11million per year in Council Tax Benefit to those people who are eligible and the government reimburses us. The system is demand led and therefore the more people who qualify, the more subsidy the government gives us.

Starting from next April, this is going to change. The government will give the council a fixed amount based on this year’s spend less 10%. If more residents become eligible for support there is no additional money to help them – we will have to find it ourselves. Also the 10% cut – around £1 million – will have to be found locally just as mainstream council budgets are being cut back with government grants reducing.

So we have been working hard to look at every council tax discount (except the single persons discount which the government has ruled must not be touched) to see if that can help bridge the 10% benefit gap.

We have consulted on scrapping the 10% discount on second homes (71% agreed), charging owners of properties left empty for two years or more an extra 50% (71% agreed), cut the exemption for empty properties under repair from 12 to six months ((79% agreed), reduce the discount on empty unfurnished properties from 6 months to one month (67% agreed)

But changing these exemptions and discounts will only close half the financial gap. So unfortunately we have had to propose changes to how people’s benefits are calculated.The changes we consulted on included a maximum payment of £20 per week, a minimum of £5, changes to how we treat other people in the household and the removal of second adult rebate. We also considered cutting the savings someone may have in the bank and still be eligible to council tax benefit from £16,000 to £6,000 (50% agreed).

Potentially all this would affect the ordinary lower income person. And if their benefit goes down and they have to pay some more council tax it could affect the council’s total council tax income meaning we might have less to spend on services.

Now at the eleventh hour the government has offered local councils £100 million back from the £400 million it will save from cutting the total council tax benefit payments by 10%. Hastings is being offered £278,000.

The offer is only for one year and is given with certain conditions, particularly that no claimant who currently has nothing to pay should have any more than 8.5% of their council tax bill to pay. Well just the reduction in the maximum of £20 per week would have affected some claimants by more than 8.5%.

Although the council may have to find some money itself to balance the figures, my view is we should take the government’s offer. We will still make all the discount and exemption changes but we will only need to implement the more limited impact benefit changes like the £5 minimum. Then we will have to see where we are again in 12 months time.

The council will take the final decision early in the New Year – but at least for this year many of our local claimants can enjoy a less worried Xmas break.

Thursday 8 November 2012

Famously Attractive

 
Opening of the Jerwood Gallery
 “I hadn't realised how lovely Hastings is.” 

That was how Masterchef celebrity Greg Wallace summed up his visit to the Seafood and Wine festival in September.” Let’s hope he now tells everyone else.

Nick Roe writing in the Times about the Great British Weekend waxed lyrical. “A spanking new art gallery has opened on the seafront, right in the middle of fish-and-chip territory, which sounds like a decisive change in the town's cultural style. A word about St Leonards: it's a westward extension of Hastings and was once quite grand but somehow ended up as a faintly seedy patchwork of rented homes set amid occasionally majestic old houses. The feeling nowadays, however, is of an area that is moving back up again.”

I agree Nick the whole borough is moving up, famously; and St Leonards is part of that movement. Tom Chesshyre writing in the Guardian Weekend about Let's Move To ...Hastings Old Town says the town “is pretty much Tom's Ideal Place, with all the things I like squished into a fold on the sea between the imaginatively titled East Hill and West Hill: faint melancholy; a smashing higgledy crush of architecture - Tudor, seaside stucco, you name it; the amazing Electric cinema that shows The Creature From The Black Lagoon; magnificent tea shops; magnificent (independent) shops; two funiculars; fishmongers and fishermen galore; a miniature railway! Plus a few special things of its own, such as the spooky, surreal, monolithic net huts on the beach, the Jerwood art gallery hard on the shingle next door, an annual Pirate Day and the home of Aleister Crowley. And it's not a squillion pounds to live there.”
These latest endorsements give just a flavour of how our town is increasingly being viewed from outside and it’s not just in the broadsheet papers either. 

The Mirror ran a story by Gill Murr about an enjoyable caravan holiday at Combe Haven. When the family ventured out they “started on the East Hill Lift, the ­steepest funicular railway in Britain and one of two in Hastings, for a spectacular view over the long ­shingle beach known as the Stade. Little stalls selling the day’s catch add to the salty sea dog atmosphere. One of the sheds forms part of the Hastings Fishermen’s Museum, a fascinating place crammed full of old photos and memorabilia.”

We couldn’t pay for positive coverage like this. The town is pitching itself to its regular visitors but clearly to a new audience too and we have the attractions – both natural and created – to do it. We just need the word to spread as wide as possible.