Opinion: Why do we pay more and get less?

Their citizens appear to welcome this approach, perhaps because it is viewed as a transaction: the taxes pay for public services which the public happily uses.

The trains run, the hospital waiting lists are low, the schools have sufficient places and equipment.

I do understand why voters get upset when their taxes go up. It’s not that they necessarily want to keep more for themselves; the polls have shown a consistent willingness to pay more taxes provided they yield improved public services.

It is the latter portion that is lacking: we are taxed more and more, yet we receive less and less.

How did we get into such a state?

It may very well be that in their efforts to supposedly save money, the government has ended up costing us more.

Social care is a good example: by reducing, in real terms, as far practicable, funds to local government, the provision for social care has also declined. Let’s say there is an elderly individual in hospital who has just

completed treatment: they can go home but require assistance around the house.

Theoretically, social care should be there to provide that assistance. However, because of austerity, social care is less available, if at all.

So, what is the hospital to do? The individual can’t be discharged if they can’t care for themselves. In the end the patient remains longer than they should; this ends up costing the NHS more, and thus us, the taxpayer more.

In my working life, I have often seen examples of “penny wise, pound foolish”. A business may postpone or cancel a strategic investment thinking this will improve the bottom line in the short term. However, what happens is that they have diminished their capacity to either cope or grow.

I advise clients in this scenario to think carefully: what looks like a cost today, is likely an investment, and may bring savings and growth tomorrow.

The Conservatives have shown themselves to be distinctly incapable of thinking like this.

If we look at our local administration, we can find a catalogue of schemes which haven’t yielded a return. Fletton Quays is a good example; regardless of what the council may say, it has not yet delivered in terms of decent return-on-investment.

Worse, at the same time the council has consistently failed to deliver on housing for social rent. Perhaps it would have been better to focus less on a few big headlines than on delivery where it mattered. In the

end, we pay taxes for this. There’s a hole in the budget, blown apart further recently by mismanagement both locally and in Westminster: and we will pay more for that. We can expect to get fewer public services in return.

So, I do fully appreciate the voter who is reluctant to pay tax. They rightly point out that the Conservatives have schemes like “non-doms” which means rich residents of our country don’t pay it, yet the rest of us do. Big corporations take advantage of loopholes not available to most citizens. We pay and unlike a lot of other countries, get little.

What is happening is neither normal nor correct.

Quite frankly, we are being ripped off.