Opinion: The Conservatives are piling the financial misery onto Mansfield’s residents

Nottinghamshire Council’s proposed increase of £84.74 in Council tax for a band D property this year combined with last year’s £64.24 amounts to staggering £148.98 increase in the last two years, which is totally unaffordable to the residents of Mansfield whose average wage is £25,000 per annum.

Mansfield’s MP, Coun Ben Bradley, the county council leader, should realise the financial burden of this astronomical rise will hit Mansfield’s residents far harder than those in Nottingham, whose average annual salary is about £10 000 more. This certainly isn’t ‘Levelling Up’.Last year’s additional 1 per cent precept to fix the counties’ roads was also unacceptable as the Chancellor awarded £342 million to the East Midlands in the previous autumn statement specifically to fix potholes, so why are Nottinghamshire in the bottom third of the ‘National Pot Hole Repair’ League?

The temporary repairs being undertaken are a wasteful use of millions of pounds and the aggregate from these temporary repairs are causing our road sweepers additional work in Mansfield and clogging up our gullies, causing flooding when it rains.

I made a similar challenge at the police and crime commissioner’s precept meeting which has proposed a £14.94 rise.

I set out the following reasons why they should freeze the increase this year:

Mansfield residents along with the rest of Nottinghamshire are suffering from one of the worst cost-of-living crisises in generations and families can barely survive so the PCC should’cut their cloth to meet their needs like the rest of the population not impose a whopping 5.9 per cent increase; The Conservative Government should not shift the responsibility for properly funding the Police onto local government. It is an underhand way of shifting blame locally; The police have already received a substantial increase in funding over the last 3 years, £481m, unlike Local Government who continue to have to be more efficient to keep council tax down to help our hard hit residents. We continue having to do more with less and the PCC should do likewise until the economy recovers. We all need more money for services as a result of a decade of Tory cuts, but now is not the time to ask our residents to pay more. That is why we have frozen our council tax for the second year in succession and taken a 10 per cent cut in our allowances; If the Conservative PCC wants to raise additional funds, the money should be taken from the general reserves as we are in unprecedented times and there has never been a more justified reason for doing so. The PCC is indirectly “stoking up” inflation by increasing the burden on working people who in turn will be requesting increased wages to survive.

Repeated increase in interest rates

The Bank of England has now raised interest rates 10 times in just more than a year resulting in the average tracker mortgage customers paying a staggering £382 more and variable mortgage holders £240 more.

This in turn results in private rent prices going through the roof and people with bank loans and credit cards also paying more.The purpose of increasing interest rates is to control an economy overheating because of rapid growth, but financial experts are predicting a long deep recession with the UK having the worst growth in Europe, so what is the reason for this strategy?

The only reason for this punishing financial burden being inflicted on working people is the Government is trying to repair its damaged financial credibility internationally after the disastrous Truss economics wiped billions off our reserves.

Our families need help now to cope with the extraordinary financial pressures facing them. The Conservatives to need to cancel these rises.

Andy Abrahams is Mansfield’s Labour leader and mayor.