The great pickpocket of 20th-century imagination operated from the Inland Revenue. It hardly mattered whether it was Taxman Mr Wilson or Taxman Mr Heath. George Harrison sang about the avarice of both, adding “my advice to those who die/is count the pennies on your eyes”.
A different demon stalks 21st-century deathbeds – Axman Mr Osborne. He too makes dying more expensive, but in very different ways. Although the chancellor is trimming inheritance tax, his cutbacks for local councils have already pushed average bills for public crematoriums up by a third since 2010. This singularly unavoidable charge illustrates a wider drift away from public funding for public services, towards pay-as-you-go government.
The Conservatives boast of squeezing public spending instead of raising taxes, and on paper can report a rough ratio of £9 of retrenchment for every £1 of taxes raised. Don’t imagine, however, that this is all about the state stopping doing real things. Sure, there has been some of that, as every shuttered library and Sure Start centre attests. Just as important, however, has been a prolonged squeeze on public pay, and then also the slow reimagining of service users as paying customers, ripe for fleecing.
The near tripling of university fees is perhaps the single starkest example. But, in no particular order, there has also been: new charges for pursuing an employer over unfair dismissal, as well as for a convict’s “use” of a criminal court; 30%-50% rises in ticket costs at pay-for exhibits at the big museums; and such great hikes in the cost of parking meters and permits that councils last year increased their take by 12%. And this in an era of disappearing inflation. A great deal of financial misery has been pushed out to town halls to mete out in their own way, so the national story disintegrates into disparate rows about new charges on, say, pest control in Darlington or waste disposal in Lancashire.
Back-office fees are sometimes a crude cover for cuts which will soon be felt on the frontline – the mooted 300% rise in the fees that care homes must pay towards their own inspection being a case in point. But charging isn’t always wrong. Sometimes it will be the only way to keep a service going, and – when a council is providing a service which has no social benefit beyond the immediate user – it will make sense in principle too.
In all sorts of other scenarios, however, the effects will be perverse. The wrong people will pay. Public servants will squander valuable time chasing small amounts of money, a clear danger in the plan to chase immigrants more aggressively for the cost of NHS care. Wider goals of policy will be compromised: it is reported that the spending review will hand the same developers that the government hopes will solve the housing crisis a socking rise in planning fees.
The scramble to fund social policy without resort to taxation has seen the BBC being forced to fund perks for old people. It explains, too, the chancellor’s fast unravelling scheme to axe tax credits, while demanding that employers provide inadequate, scattergun compensation through a higher minimum wage. The easiest cuts have already been made, and the public pay freeze can’t be sustained forever, and so the perversities are set to intensify after next week’s spending review. It’s enough to make one nostalgic for the Taxman days.
