Labour can't have it both ways on council tax

Opposition leader Cllr Peter Zinkin says Labour’s position does not stand up to scrutiny

Barnet Council's Colindale office and (inset) Tory group leader Peter Zinkin — Barnet Council’s Colindale office and (inset) Tory group leader Peter Zinkin

In last week’s Barnet Post, cabinet member for finance Cllr Simon Radford set out a £200 million budget gap and its consequences. What is indisputable is that the gap has grown every year Labour has run the council, and Labour has made no progress in closing it.

What we dispute is Labour’s account of how we got here.

We are proud that Barnet Conservatives kept council tax down. It is what residents wanted, and what Barnet Conservatives have always done. We spent what they paid on the services they rely on. Today, every Band D household pays over £400 a year less than the government says it should. That money stayed with Barnet families, not with the Council.

It is Labour’s position that does not stand up to scrutiny. Cllr Radford’s case is that Conservative administrations saw the ‘Graph of Doom’ and kept council tax low anyway. There is an argument that tax could have been raised further to build a war chest. But it would not be right. Residents’ money belongs with residents, not in a council reserve waiting for a rainy day. In any event, Labour has never made that argument. In fact, it said the opposite.

In the 2022 election Labour offered a council tax rebate. In May this year its leaflets claimed the Conservatives would raise council tax “by more than 50%” and “above the legal maximum”. Labour promised that increases would be “a last resort”, and that it would avoid “costly referendums on council tax that just tell us what we already know – Barnet residents want to keep council tax as low as possible.” Those are Labour’s words, not ours.

Yet Labour has raised council tax by (very close to) the maximum almost every year it has been in office. That is hardly a last resort. Now, asked whether bills will rise towards the national average, Cllr Radford says that is “partly right”. Getting there will mean rises way beyond the legal maximum.

The push to do this comes from Whitehall. The Labour government’s Fair Funding Review calculates Barnet’s grant as if residents already paid a “notional” council tax based on the national average, and that figure rises every year. Cllr Radford himself wrote in these pages in August that for Barnet this means a Band D rate of £2,060, an increase of over 30%. Any hike here will be a Labour policy fashioned in Whitehall and implemented by a Labour council.

We said so when the settlement was announced. I wrote about it in the the Post and, more importantly, had officers model it for the budget debate. Cllr Radford welcomed the settlement last December, then accused us of scaremongering at the budget, with the officers’ figures in front of him. Then in May, Labour’s leaflets told voters the opposite. He should explain why.

Now he says the Cipfa review told the council what it “already knew”. If so, why did it take a government-commissioned review, after two years of asking for exceptional financial support, to get Labour talking about council tax? That is not leadership. It is burying your head in the sand until financial disaster is at the door.

Radford’s interview then goes on to talk about the Capita contract, which ends this week. It gives no figure for what ending it has saved. The council’s own papers show why. In July 2022 the published estimate for bringing the remaining services in-house was £2.616m a year of extra cost. By November 2024 it was £1m to £1.5m, then £1m to £2m. This month it is “within the current cost and budget envelope”, with no number at all.

Labour has since re-outsourced most of what was left. Full insourcing was “considered and discounted”. Only IT, about 18 staff, is coming in-house, and only because the replacement contract collapsed.

Leaving Capita was not Labour’s idea either. After a cross-party review, policy and resources committee, chaired by Conservatives, voted 13–0 in December 2021 to bring four services back at broadly neutral cost. Labour widened that to nine services and around 370 staff without ever publishing the extra pension cost. Yet in 2025 it costed exactly that for the education service, £1.56m a year, and rejected insourcing because of it.

Cllr Radford says he wants residents to understand the trade-offs. He could start by publishing the total cost of leaving Capita, including the extra pension costs, the 2025 settlement and the total cost of the Oracle system that replaced Capita’s. Individual contracts may be commercially confidential, but aggregate figures are not.

Labour can’t have it both ways. In May they told voters that residents want council tax kept as low as possible. In September, they blame us for doing exactly that. If they plan to take Band D to the government’s level, £2,060 and rising, Cllr Radford and the Labour group should say so now, not next February when the budget is already written, and tell every household what they will be paying.

Peter Zinkin is leader of Barnet Conservative group.

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