Trying to pay my taxes via the HMRC website the other week, my bank thought it had sniffed a rat. “Could this be a scam?” it popped up and asked. I went ahead and made the payment anyway, but the honest answer was yes, ‘scam’ is not an unreasonable way of putting it. Every year, my tax bill seems to sneak upwards while I seem to get a little less for my money.
Every year, my tax bill seems to sneak upwards while I seem to get a little less for my money
I don’t think that is quite what the Prime Minister meant, however, when he wrote a piece in the Guardian today promising to end “the rip-offs that British people hate”. He had more in mind hard-to-cancel subscriptions and shop ‘bargains’ which turn out to be not such a good deal after all. “Every single unexpected payment, rip off or hidden catch chips away at hope,” he wrote. “That might sound dramatic – but it’s true. Every single one is another message that this country is built to catch people out rather than help them get on”.
Fair enough. Consumer law, I think, is too weak in some areas. Burnham’s proposal to force businesses to contact customers before automatically renewing a subscription is entirely reasonable. Nor should we be made to jump through hoops to cancel a service. If we can buy something online, we should be able to cancel it online, too: not ring some helpline which subjects us to marketing spiel and then ignores our instructions. Burnham claims that we waste a collective £1.6 billion a year on stuff that we don’t really want, which sounds plausible.
But he shouldn’t lose sight of Britain’s single biggest rip-off, which he is in charge of himself: the public sector. Disgracefully, productivity in the public services is no higher than it was 30 years ago, in spite of the vast improvements in technology in the interim, which should have made them vastly more efficient. To pay for this lousy performance, we are being subjected to a devious tax rise: the freezing of income tax bands and the personal tax-free allowance. That is exactly the kind of underhand technique which Burnham seems to be criticising in the private sector.
In so many ways, the state now apes the worst practices of private businesses. Take road tolls. You used to pay to use the Dartford Crossing by chucking a pound coin in a bucket. Now, you have to pay online by midnight on the day after you have crossed or face a stiff fine. It is okay if you know the system, but for motorists new to the road all they see is a sign by the roadside telling them to ‘pay online’, easily missed if you are concentrating on four lanes of traffic.
Or take the litter fines that are being sprung on soft targets like old ladies feeding the ducks in the park or people leaving their wheelie bins out on the wrong day, while fly-tippers get away with dumping fridges in the countryside. Or the fines for having your bumper overhang a yellow box junction which, thanks to traffic lights beyond the junction, it is virtually impossible to avoid. Local councils are milking us for all they can get away with – yes, the very same councils to which Burnham wants to hand more powers.
Like other self-employed people I now have to submit four tax returns a year, with the threat of fines if I miss the date. There are yet more fines if we forget to renew our car tax – extremely easy to do now that we no longer have a physical disc on our windscreen to remind us when it expires.
We now have punitive taxes on second homes and on cars which originally sold for £40,000 (even if we paid far less for them years later). And don’t get me started on the railways, whose Byzantine ticketing system is designed to trap the unwary, to treat as fare-dodgers people who are trying to do the right thing.
Promise to end rip-off Britain? Yes, great idea. But it is going to have to start in Westminster. At least with broadband subscriptions we have a choice. With HM Government on the other hand, we have to lump it whether we like it or not.
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