14 Nov COUNCIL TAX RISE MUST BE TIED TO EFFICIENCY GAINS SAYS SHADOW HOUSING SECRETARY
THE Shadow Housing Secretary has said that a planned 5% rise in Council Tax must be accompanied by a drive for efficiency savings.
He also said that the investigation into the journalist Alison Pearson over a deleted social media message was “very worrying” and that free speech and freedom of the Press appear to be under threat by the police.
Kevin Hollinrake told GB News: “It’s going up by 5%, we’re very worried that we’re not going to be seeing improvement of services alongside that.
“And of course, it comes on the back of this £25 billion job tax, which the Chancellor doesn’t seem to realise is going to mean higher prices, lower wages and lots of impacts on areas she hadn’t considered things, like GP surgeries.
“So really, really damaging and Kemi Badenoch yesterday had to tease that out of him [Keir Starmer] had he really thought about this?
“So having said there’d be no tax increases, everything was fully costed and fully funded, now we realise there’s £25 billion of taxes, which really is going to hit working people, and even people are not working and just buying stuff, because things are going to be dearer in the shops.”
Asked what the Tories would do differently, he said: “We could reform welfare. I mean, welfare is costing tens of billions of pounds more than it was pre pandemic. We could make the public sector more efficient.
“It’s costing tens of billions of pounds more to run the public sector than it was in terms of efficiency, because it’s 7% less efficient than it was pre-pandemic. That’s what we had a plan to do.
“Instead, what we’ve seen is Labour just doing what they said they wouldn’t do, which is jump for the tax raising lever, which is about £70 billion of tax increases and borrowing extra every single year. And they said they wouldn’t.”
Asked about the police investigation into the journalist Alison Pearson, he said: “It’s very worrying. I think the timing of it, I think the fact she is a journalist – she wasn’t able to talk about what she’d actually said in this tweet, but I can’t imagine Alison Pearson would be somebody who would instigate some kind of hatred or violence against individuals.
“That’s what that law is supposed to prevent. If it actually is then used to prevent freedom of speech, that’s absolutely fundamentally wrong.
“There are some fundamental principles in society that we have that we must defend at all costs. Freedom of speech is one of them. Freedom of press is another and both these things seem to be under threat by this move by the police.
“The police have a tough job to do. There’s no question about it, and there’s no way people should be inciting violence against anybody else on Twitter and social media, as they shouldn’t do in a pub or anywhere else.
“But where you are talking about journalists who are speaking freely, that should not be a matter for the police in my view.”
