5 November (Part 2) - Bexonomics
Traipsing
around supermarkets is not my idea of fun, especially early in the morning in
the local Sainsbury’s when they seem to be reluctant to take your money. I
usually use the self-service tills but that’s not so
easy when picking up a newspaper with a pre-paid
token. I won’t mention the weekly Stannah travelator failure.
But at least the self-service tills give change.
Would anyone tolerate a supermarket that didn’t? So why do we accept it from
local Councils just because most of them are run by crooks? Who was it who first
decided that not offering change was a reasonable thing to do?
A Freedom of Information request reveals that Bexley Council has never operated
a machine that gives change as you would expect from a Council that has a
criminal mindset.
The same FOI also shows how Bexley Council believes in killing the goose that
lays the golden egg.
The natural growth in the economy and car ownership should see a steady increase
in car parking revenue but it hasn’t gone that way in Bexley.
The Council took £1,275,925.17 in 2009/10 and before Councillor Craske
got greedy it rose to £1,508,170.80 by 2011/12. However his price increases
knocked it back to £1,310,645.47 in 2014/15. Where do these odd seven pences come from?
The official inflation calculator says that the equivalent of £1,275,925.17 in
2010 would be £1,528583 in 2015 so the revenue then was worth a lot less than it
was before the price increases kicked in.
Fortunately increased car park usage took the revenue up to
£1,427,646.38 in the year ending last April, still £120,000 behind the inflated 2010
value. I wonder how much of that came from renting the whole of the Felixstowe
Road car park to Network Rail?
But what did Bexley Council do as soon as it saw the revenue on the rise
again? It whacked up car parking charges by various rates between 10 and 50%.
Will history be repeating itself?