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Some of what makes Oxford a fantastic place also puts intense pressures on those who live in and use the city. We are rightly precious of both our built and natural environment and heritage. The City Council's current local plan, the document that sets out policies about how they expect Oxford to develop in land use terms, neatly encapsulates some of these pressures:

• We have about 145,000 residents, of which nearly 30,000 are students - and therefore not always "permanent" residents, and usually not paying council taxes, though of course of crucial importance to the local economy and cultural vibrancy of the city.
• Of the approximately 100,000 jobs in the city, around half are filled by people commuting from outside the city, putting intense pressures on our transport infrastructure, which are extremely difficult to accommodate given the historic urban design nature of the city centre.
• We have about 5 million tourist visitors a year, also adding to pressures on transport and accommodation.
• We are an attractive area of more affluent workers deciding to live outside of London and commute.

It is also clear that living in the city is disadvantageous to health, educational and economic achievement (of the long term resident population - often masked by the fact that we have the highest level of degree level qualifications in the South East), and wealth:

• Health - Oxford has several areas in the lowest twenty per cent of England and Wales for "good health"
• Educational achievement - again we have several areas, predominantly in the east of the city, in the lowest twenty per cent of pupils achieving 5 A* to C grades at GCSE
• Crime - again predominantly in the centre and east of the city we have several areas with crime rates in the highest twenty per cent of the country and nearly all of the city has higher than average crime for the whole country.
• Housing - the lack of affordable housing in Oxford means that we are amongst the worst places in the country for people to be able to get the housing they need at a price they can afford. On this map you need to look at the equivalent urban areas - blue means access to housing is most difficult and it's no surprise that in rural areas where few houses are developed or already exist there are more problems affording them, but look at Oxford compared with Banbury, Bicester, Witney and so on. Oxford is nearly all blue (unaffordable).

Putting all these together, this map shows that Oxford has some significant pockets of deprivation amongst the worst in the country. These areas can become a focus for anti-social behaviour on the part of the few that disproportionately affects the quality of life for the many.

These pressures feed through into pressures on city governance and directly affect all of us through our taxes and quality of life. For example:

• The cost of homelessness amounts to around £4.5 million to the council and double that to all public revenue sources such as central government funded Housing Benefit. That's fully half of the council tax collected.
• The need for people to commute, many of whom can only afford housing in the expanding towns beyond the green belt, causes traffic difficulties in our historic city centre and the radial feeder roads through our suburban centres.
• The city has an ageing housing stock, increasingly environmentally inefficient, in both the private sector and the council owned housing, its inner suburbs were built before the prevalence of private motor vehicles and the infrastructure of its outer suburbs is crumbling, and much of the inner suburbs local populations are displaced when family homes are converted to student lets.
• We have a cornucopia of facilities, for sport, leisure and the arts, but they are often in the control of and designed for the universities' and their students use. Whilst the city council owns and operates several major sporting and leisure facilities, lack of investment means they cannot compete with more modern private facilities and do not maintain the cross section of users to pay for them properly - the leisure centres run at a £3million loss on a turnover of just over £7million.
• In business, local businesses are often squeezed out by high and increasing commercial rents, especially in the city and district centres, whilst because of the housing pressures others find it difficult to recruit and retain employees.
• In governance, whilst the city is asset rich, amongst the highest in the country, it is cash poor, and what cash is generated will, if things carry on as at present, be required just to bring council houses up to the minimum "Decent Home" standards.

We need to find innovative ways around central government restrictions to free up assets to be used for the benefit of all the people of Oxford. I hope to set out in the remainder of this manifesto some of these ideas to see us into the twenty-first century as a city in which all get an equitable share of the many benefits of being part of this vibrant, diverse, innovative and world leading city.

Here starteth the saga of my dealings with a bunch of sharks who are a subsidiary of "The World's Local Bank". I don't want to bleat too much - the usual rebuttals that "you should have read the small print" apply and I've been foolish. But I do want to warn others if I can to take a more circumspect view of dealing with HFC Bank.

Sine I live in halls of residence, and have done now for over ten years as a warden, getting credit is sometimes difficult. In fact getting anything that requires some nit-wit to rely on the electronic vomit coming out of an automated search using postal details. The Post Office and the local electoral roll office have never, in all that time, got my and my fellow wardens' addresses quite right.

I don't exist on those databases that insurance companies use to give you a quote, or the National Lottery use to give you an account, and I can't find myself on Equifax and so on. So I am quite precious about my dealings with people who rely on this information. It has helped me be more responsible towards my bank - because I know if I had to cut and run to another bank they would have the same difficulties. I haven't switched from Vodafone because none of the other operators, without the benefit of ten years' worth of account history with them, can find me.

And so, about eight years ago I was pleased to be able to buy a Hi-Fi on a year's interest free credit. One of those deals where you pay the full amount at the end of the year or begin paying installments with interest. Well of course when the time fell due I didn't quite have the full amount so started paying installments. After a while I started getting sales brochures from HFC Bank, with whom the credit had been arranged (even if it wasn't in that name when I did so I don't think) suggesting I transfer the debt to some kind of "personal loan plus" which would give me the ability to add more credit to it as I wanted. Stupidly, I did.

Then, when I was nearing the limit on that arrangement they started pestering me by phone to come in and talk about changing it to a proper unsecured personal loan. Well, I did. I was and am still not a "distressed debtor" but the interest rate was bonkers and they were offering to reduce the rate and payments and so on. I checked up with my own bank and they didn't feel that they could lend me the money so I went along with HFC's recommendations.

I fully expected to be in better circumstances a short way into the loan and to be able to settle early, so I specifically asked about that and was told something like "oh you'll just pay off the balance and a month's interest" or something like that. So I opted for a long loan, 84 months, to reduce the payments in the short term with the intention of then clearing the debt early - because whilst it was indeed a lower interest rate than I had on the extended store credit it was still high by anyone's standards (higher even than they had suggested to entice me through the door in fact).

Now that point has arrived. I've paid 36 months out of 84 months, that's 3/7th of the loan period. I've paid 36 times £364.81 for a total to date of £13,133 and some change. The original loan was for £15,000. I would expect therefore to have been paying a mix of principle, interest and payment protection premium right the way through that period and for a settlement figure to be around 36/84ths of the original amount borrowed of £15,000. Around £8,500.

Now, apart from the fact that they seem more reluctant to give me a settlement figure than they were to entice me through their doors in the first place, I ifnally yesterday got someone to give me an indicative figure over the phone. If you noticed a small earthquake in the east Oxford area around 17:30 last night it will have been my jaw hitting the floor as I was told £12,900 and something.

Now, I'm not completely financially illiterate (though no doubt many of their other suckers of customers are not as well informed or aware as I can be), just have been fairly blase and irresponsible about my own circumstances over the years. But I cannot work out where such a figure might possibly come from. It's not 48/84ths of the entire cost of the loan including interest, but it's closer to that than to the balance remaining of the principle. I suspect they are doing something like front loading their interest and all the other charges, which was not clear at the time (though no doubt clear under a microscope at 100x magnification in a microdot somewhere on the terms and conditions of the loan) - and remember, I did make clear at the time that i was looking to repay it early even before I had taken it out.

So, if anyone else is offered a nice cup of tea in their plush offices wherever you live, look very very carefully in that particular horse's mouth. It would appear that this loan is simply not worth paying off early and that I'm stuck shelling out £30,000+ for what was a £15,000 loan, or £364 per month for the next four years. It seems they take the most vulnerable, the so called "sub-prime" market, and not only charge them an extortionate interest rate (in my case 14.9% APR) but front load the debt so that early settlement is not really worth doing.

I am no fan of banks at the best of times, and HFC of course does not even have depositors or current accounts so is a perfect example of banks making money out of thin air - nobody can possibly argue with me that their balance sheet matches up savers with lenders or anything of the sort, but if HSBC believe this is acceptable behaviour for a member of their global banking group, I'm disgusted.

Spotted this at the Adam Smith Institute blog:

The future of rubbish:

So I was pleased to learn of a new, private collection service called Bin & Gone in Yorkshire, which apparently charges £90 a year to ensure householders get a weekly collection, and has bought its own refuse truck to do so. Meanwhile a friend in Hampshire tells me that a body in Romsey also plans a private alternative to the local authority's service (or lack of it), and are putting out flyers to gauge the market. The service "will be provided at minimal cost and include the supply of free dustbin and peddle bin liners as well as a free bin washing service" - rather better than the council's grudging effort.

Of course, a number of local authorities already contract out their refuse collection to private companies. But under this system, householders pay directly for the service they choose, rather than pay for a service they have no choice about, through local taxes. The new trend might be modest at present: but it does show that one of the local authorities' key services can in fact be done better, and more satisfactorily for customers, by private enterprise. Makes you wonder what we pay Council Tax for.

Keep up! There was a discussion about this way back in August last year after an IPPR report on rubbish. I blogged about it and it even got picked up by the Guardian.

Technorati Tags: taxation, waste wars

I was pleasantly surprised today to see that on the southern regional slot on the Politics Show on BBC1 they had an article looking at how the Lib Dems would introduce Land Value Tax - portraying it indeed as a "silver bullet" (Paul, and the BBC, have a great deal more confidence than I have in this respect!). Cllr Paul Bizzell of Vale of White Horse, where they carried out a paper based exercise nearly two years ago now into how it would affect an area of about a ward to the west of Oxford city, was explaining it, and did quite a good job - as he should!

County Council leader, Conservative Keith Mitchell was the "anti-LVT" interviewee, castigating it as a "left wing tax" that is designed to blight our beautiful country and to redistribute wealth - something, he said, that "we are not all in agreement with". So I've fired off a nice letter to Kaiser Keith:

Keith,

Much as I respect your views I think you should perhaps investigate the history of Land Value Tax's supporters:

Adam Smith:

"Both ground-rents and the ordinary rent of land are a species of revenue which the owner, in many cases, enjoys without any care or attention of his own. Though a part of this revenue should be taken from him in order to defray the expenses of the state, no discouragement will thereby be given to any sort of industry. ...Ground-rents, and the ordinary rent of land, are therefore, perhaps, the species of revenue which can best bear to have a peculiar tax imposed upon them.

"Ground rents seem in this respect a more proper subject of peculiar taxation than even the ordinary rent of land. ...Ground-rents, so far as they exceed the ordinary rent of land, are altogether owing to the good government of the sovereign. ...Nothing can be more reasonable than that a fund which owes its existence to the good government of the stae should be taxed peculiarly, or should contribute something more than the greater part of other funds towards the support of that government."

Milton Friedman:

"There's a sense in which all taxes are antagonistic to free enterprise -- and yet we need taxes. ...So the question is, which are the least bad taxes? In my opinion the least bad tax is the property tax on the unimproved value of land, the Henry George argument of many, many years ago."

William F Buckley:

"It's mostly because I'm beaten down by my right-wing theorists and intellectual friends. They always find something wrong with the Single-Tax idea. What I'm talking about Mr. Lamb is Henry George who said there is infinite capacity to increase capital and to increase labor, but none to increase land, and since wealth is a function of how they play against each other, land should be thought of as common property. The effect of this would be that if you have a parking lot and the Empire State Building next to it, the tax on the parking lot should be the same as the tax on the Empire State Building, because you shouldn't encourage land speculation. Anyway I've run into tons of situations were I think the Single-Tax theory would be applicable. We should remember also this about Henry George, he was sort of co-opted by the socialists in the 20s and the 30s, but he was not one at all. Alfred J. Nock's book on him makes that plain. Plus, also, he believes in only that tax. He believes in zero income tax."

And not least that greatest son of Oxfordshire, Winston Churchill (albeit a Liberal at the time):

"I have made speeches by the yard on the subject of land value taxation, and you know what a supporter I am of that policy.

"It is quite true that the land monopoly is not the only monopoly which exists, but it is by far the greatest of monopolies -- it is a perpetual monopoly, and it is the mother of all forms of monopoly.

"Nothing is more amusing than to watch the efforts of our monopolist opponents to prove that other forms of property and increment are exactly the same, and are similar in all respects to the unearned increment in land."

Henry George was himself no socialist. Remember that the aim of us "single taxers" is to abolish all taxes on incomes, capital, profit that arise from human effort and hard work. It is unashamedly classically liberal and owes far more to the work of people whom the "right", and especially the libertarian right, would now look on as their predecessors than the "left" would - people like John Locke, David Ricardo, Malthus.

It is possibly a common fate of a good idea that it gets rubbished by all-comers who don't understand it. Georgists are castigated by the "right" as dangerous socialists, even communists, and by the left as loony neo-liberals. We must be doing something right!

It's worth noting that one of the biggest current proponents of LVT in print, Fred Harrison, has been published on it by the IEA, hardly some left-wing think tank. Though I suppose within your own party it is the looney left Bow Group who are promoting the idea, after a fashion.

Sincerely,

Jock