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Sir,

As a former and in a few days hopefully future local councillor my heart leapt as I read Danny Kruger today (Telegraph | Opinion | If councils had real power, people wouldn't dream of voting BNP) accurately diagnose the problem with local government and accountability. But I'm afraid it sank again when he listed his tax options. He recognized Local Income Tax as a tax on an economic good - work, but his preferred option, Local Sales Tax is similarly a tax on an economic good - trade. Being fair, he does propose LST should replace an existing bad tax on trade - VAT, but it doesn't improve it just because it is local. But he neglected a most obvious possibility, a tax not on homes or buildings, but on land values.

Land Value Tax (usually known as Site Value Rating when in a local context) taxes an economic bad - the underuse of our most precious resource, land, within the planning framework. In 1909 Churchill spoke about those who hold land at below its best permitted use knowing that one day the social and commercial interactions around it would increase its value with no effort at all on their part.

SVR recaptures and recycles the value of investment, both public and private sector, that goes into making a site valuable. It would help stabilize land values and take the speculative hype out of the market that excludes so many from basics such as home ownership. The Institute of Economic Affairs has recently promoted LVT for transport infrastructure funding in "Wheels of Fortune" by Fred Harrison, and Conservative MP David Curry is a supporter. It taxes a monopoly - every site is a monopoly of different factors affecting its value - from being in a good school's catchment area to being next to the new Jubilee Line extension station or Olympic investment.

If Mr Cameron wants verdant sustainability, LVT/SVR is the obvious choice, and indeed is a must in an era of "eco-taxation" to provide people with real choices and control their tax liabilities. Whether local or national, it would automatically create a movement of economic activity from overheated areas, with high land values and therefore high taxes, to underperforming areas of low value and tax, allowing significant cuts in government redistribution mechanisms as the "market" in tax takes over those functions.

Sincerely,

Jock Coats

Alexis Rowell, of the Belsize Lib Dems blog, gets a fabulous write-up from Peter Stothard of the TLS:

A worm's eye for politics

After decades of living in North London, meeting politicians (too many) and writing about politics (too much), I'm beginning to feel for the first time that I'm genuinely represented by one.

No, not Glenda Jackson, the movie-star-turned-axe-face-of-the-old Left and my veteran Member of Parliament here in the Hampstead part of Camden. There is still some way to go before the House of Commons itself has anything for me.

No, not Lord Adonis of Camden Town, the former Andrew Adonis, the closest thing to a natural TLS-reader in the Blair and Brown governments. His choice of title for his appointed place in the Upper House of our legislature, while pleasing, does not make him strictly any representative of mine.

I do, however, have a local Councillor. He is called Alexis Rowell, a Liberal Democrat, an environmental campaigner, a blogger, a man with a wormery in his garden and good advice on electricity suppliers - and, mirabile dictu, he deals with his constituents about what is happening in the streets around us.

He genuinely represents.

Read the rest at The Times - nice one Alexis!

University fees. Oh dear, what a sensitive subject. I've just watched Question Time's "Next Generation" edition and the biggest applause came for a question on scrapping tuition fees, and today I had my last Academic Board here in which we were treated to a presentation on the National Student Satisfaction Survey initial results.

I'm reminded that Stephen Tall takes an apparently very un-Lib Dem position on tuition fees and that we are currently thinking about the party's future policy on Higher Education funding. But, horror of horrors, I think I'm beginning to agree. I suppose I ought to be careful about what I say here. I am one of the elected staff governors of my institution, and at some point in my four year term I dare say we're going to have to take a position on the future of university fees in order to feed into the process of deciding what happens next when the £3,000 annual cap on fees is debated around 2010.

Next academic year, as the elected governor, I am hoping to host a series of events for staff and students to help inform any decision I might have to participate in on this and some other pressing issues, such as the pressures universities face to bring in corporate "partners" (privatise to most people I suspect) in various areas of operation. So for now, these thoughts are just musings on what might be one line of reasoning.

Back to the National Student Satisfaction Survey. We were presented with a very pretty colourful document showing a table with red blobs for where the university scored in the lower quartile of student responses nationally and green ones where we scored in the top quartile, and yellows for he in-between areas. There's a huge project going on nationally to collect and interpret these data and eventually the "results" will be on the UCAS website supposedly to help prospective students decide where to go.

I have to say they seem pretty subjective - for a start universities themselves can't control in what groups, and some of them seem pretty counter-intuitivie, particular subjects may be placed. And then the raw figures do not seem to reflect the numbers of students on a course. So you could have a hundred courses with three students on each, where one student completed the survey and gave you a bad mark and you'd end up with a hundred rows of "red" squares and one course with a thousand students on where 700 completed the survey and gave you top marks and you'd end up with a mostly red page.

And I suddenly realized where in my varied career I had seen such a chart before. It looked just like the old Stock Exchange FTSE-100 SEAQ/Ceefax prices screen with reds for falling shares and in that case blue for rising prices. And it got me thinking...someone is expending an awful lot of effort to translate student perceptions into some pseudo-objective rating for an institution or subject that is intended to give a guide on which basis people will choose what institution or course to go to.

But because there's no real market in fees - practically nobody has decided to charge less than the £3,070 "maximum" fee (mainly because it is nothing like enough to make up for the 60% real terms drop in state funding over the past couple of decades) - this perceptual information cannot translate into prospective students' value judgment about where to spend their money. This effectively compulsory tax on learning cannot put a price on any particular course or institution or any number of factors why someone might want to study somewhere.

There seems to be an assumption, from my observations of conversations of other governors and senior management of universities, that the fees cap will need to be completely abandoned when the next decision date comes along in 2010. And they're right, to an extent. This muddle cannot continue. It is serving nobody. We either have to bite the bullet and fully fund free higher education, in which case you either give all institutions the same unit funding and those in which excellence comes at a price will descend to mediocrity, or we have to open up the market so universities charge their full costs in fees and make their own decisions about who to assist to afford their prices, to whom to offer discounts and for what subjects and so on.

This latter will be painful - we do not have a culture of people saving up front for college as they do in the US for example, or the incentive that though they may be not well off, they can make it onto their desired course if they achieve the grade to stand out and get a scholarship. And of course in my ideal world of land taxes paying for a citizens income there would be something to save for college, even for the least well off families. But we cannot lurch from one government decision to another every few years. This next decision in 2010 needs to be the last. It needs to set out a longer term target - either to return to full funding or to aim for a totally open market, over the course of, say, a decade, so that youngsters only just entering education now, and their families, know what to expect by the time they get to deciding on university courses.

I started to write this on Thursday evening. As I come to complete it, this story is just breaking in the Guardian. QED?

Technorati Tags: higher education, tuition fees, radicalism

ConservativeHome has done some polling on IDS's recommendations in his social justice report.

In it there's a stark hypocrisy - while 75% agree with the idea of a stricter classification of cannabis, 59%, no doubt out of self interest, disagree with the idea of putting extra money on booze taxes to pay for addiction treatments.

Let's get this right, the drug which creates the most dependency in Britain bar none is alcohol. Apart from tobacco the drug that causes the most deaths in Britain is alcohol. Cannabis, despite so many regular users, does not even register on the deaths list so far as I am aware. Alcohol consistently ranks well ahead of both cannabis and LSD and ecstasy in studies of the overall social damage it causes. The most common "gateway drug" to harder drugs is alcohol. The drug most commonly associated with mental illness episodes is...yes, alcohol.

Still, I suppose it tastes nice some of the time, when you can remember it anyway. And 8 million problem drinkers cannot be wrong can they? I wonder how many of them are in the grassroots Tory party?

They need to read Transform's report on how to regulate and reduce drug use without prohibition. Of course the Tories are not the only ones spinning the prohibition lies. But with a toking leader you'd have thought at least the Tories would be willing to have a mature discussion about it. Remind me why anyone with a libertarian bone in their body supports this shower?

Technorati Tags: alcohol, cannabis, conservatives, Dave the chameleon, drugs laws, liberty, prohibition, tories