Tandridge District Council will meet on Thursday to set the level of Council tax for the next financial year. However we will only get to set the rate on the Tandridge element - the majority of the tax burden faced by local residents comes from the County Council and Surrey Police's precept accounting for roughly the same proportion of the tax as the District Council.
The bad news for local residents is that Surrey Police have opted for a whopping 9.72% increase in its part of the council tax.
This rise is because Surrey receives one of the lowest Government grants per head of population for policing due to an unfair funding formula. If this grant was at the average rate of other forces around London (£106 per person) Surrey would receive an additional £18.2 million. The formula takes no account of the challenges Surrey faces from criminals coming into the county from elsewhere. Fifty nine per cent of identified organised crime gangs affecting Surrey are engaged in drugs supply and originate from London while 47 per cent of burglary and vehicle crime offenders come from outside Surrey, more than half of these from London. The funding formula also takes no account of the need to invest more in counter-terrorism policing.
So it looks like residents in Surrey are being asked to cough up again the decisions taken by Gordon Brown's Government to redistribute tax from the South of England to marginal Labour constituencies in the north.
