pace89
Well-Known Member
That's not really true.Gordon Brown was apt to levy taxes without too much thought about their effect in the real world. Similarly, he planned a massive effort to increase the take from council tax by levying tax on a whole range of household features such as patios, built in wardrobes, a good view (seriously, I am not making this up). He engaged a giant army of assessors in Scotland (the rest of the country to follow) but Labour lost the election before it took effect.
He did a good job in the world financial crisis, but he was otherwise a terrible chancellor.
The VAO would take into account a range of features and amenities including developments such as patios and paved driveways to inform council tax banding decisions and this applied all over the UK. The Tories instructed the VAO to end this work as part of their agenda to keep council tax artificially low. 15 years later councils are practically insolvent, the public services for which they are responsible are in dire straits and they have been stripped of capacity to anything that may support economic development or improve public services.
The idea that patios and built in wardrobes would have been subject to a tax.
In contrast, the economy grew in every year that Brown was Chancellor, public satisfaction with the NHS was at record levels, roads weren't full of potholes, new schools had been built, the armed forces retained war fighting capacity. And no councils were going bust. A terrible chancellor wouldn't have delivered any of these things.