Fatal Exception wrote:[quote="Hime"][quote="Fatal Exception"]You think the council is a lesser service? I'm not saying there's not massive wastage in most councils (there is) but have you any idea of the sort of thing they provide?
A lesser service in terms of complexity. You can't compare the management of refuge collection, social housing,etc to the generating, transmitting and distributing of electricity, the transmitting of gas, the in depth maintenance, fault repair, testing, expertise, etc that is involved in running these systems almost 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
Also, people have done amount of choice in that they can choose both their supplier and how much energy they use. People have no choice with their council tax.
Lesser was perhaps a bad word choice but it baffles me that utility prices are constantly attacked when they are incredibly good value.[/quote]
Why would you ever need to choose a supplier though? It's the illusion of choice. All you do is pick the person who is trying to rip you off the least. Why would I ever want to pick who supplies the council services? I live where I do, so someone sorts out local issues for my area. It's not practical to have market competition. Same with utilities. No one physically unhooks my power or gas, why the strawberry float should I pay different companies for the same service?
I'm not sure why you're comparing the two. They are completely different things. Council tax covers:
Youth services
Libraries
Parks, open spaces and galleries
Leisure facilities, including swimming pools and recreation centres
Social care for the elderly, children and other vulnerable members of the community
Support for the voluntary sector
Planning and building control
Refuse collection, street cleaning and other environmental issues
Maintenance of roads and bridges
Traffic management and road safety
Parking services and control
Elections, registrars of births, marriages and deaths
Cemeteries, crematoria and mortuary services
Consumer protection
Economic development and regeneration
Community development services
Housing, including the provision of social housing, housing strategy and advice and services for the homeless
Housing Benefits and Council Tax administration.
So many separate departments and services. It's comparing apples to oranges.[/quote]
Competition encourages suppliers to be run as efficiently as possible so you don't end up with the layers of middle management and job creation that were rife when the industries were nationalised. The notion that competition only exists between different physical products is ridiculous.
Anyway, I'm not suggesting that there should be competition for the services that councils provide, just that people complain about being ripped off by utility companies when the reality is that they can probably pay less.
Obviously a direct comparison can't be made but very few, if any of the services you mentioned have any technical element. Certainly nowhere near that of a utility company. This isn't exclusive to council tax, there are loads of services that are far more of a rip off.