Councils and the executive must do more to improve public services, and stop treating ratepayers as cash-cows - The Irish News view

Rates bills won’t so much drop as thud on to householders’ door mats in the coming weeks. Ratepayers are facing a double whammy from councils and the Stormont executive, with steep above-inflation hikes being imposed.

Read more: Every Northern Ireland council to increase rates by more than inflation

Inflation, a measure of the rate at which prices are rising, currently stands at 2.5%. Executive ministers have agreed that homeowners should face a double-inflation jump of 5% in the regional element of their rates. Whether public services will improve by 5% remains to be seen.

Councils have also set steep rises. Ratepayers in Belfast may feel particularly aggrieved. Its councillors have decided to hike the district rate by an eye-watering 5.99%. Few will be convinced that this has been kept “as low as possible”, as Sinn Féin councillor Ryan Murphy, chair of the strategic policy and resources committee, insists.

Belfast councillors have inflicted a series of sharp cracks of the whip on the backs of ratepayers in recent years - a 5.44% rise last year and a whopping 7.99% before that. It amounts to an increase of more than 20% in four years. People are entitled to ask what they are getting in return for these bigger bills in terms of better services.

Three councils have settled on increases around 5% - Mid Ulster, Antrim and Newtownabbey, and Derry City and Strabane - while the remainder have imposed rises between 3.65% and 3.99%.

Councils and the executive must do more to improve public services, and stop treating ratepayers as cash-cows

Amid all this, it remains difficult to discern if the savings that were promised when district councils were reorganised and reduced from 26 to 11 have ever been truly realised.

Some councils have cited the cost of covering increased national insurance contributions this year as at least part of the explanation for their inflation-busting rate rises. Derry and Strabane council, for example, said the Labour government’s policy had added an extra £1.1m to its wage costs. This amounted to a “direct 1.21% impact on rates bills”, it said.

However, the British government has committed to giving the Stormont executive the money needed to cover the councils' extra national insurance costs. But as secretary of state Hilary Benn confirmed to this newspaper last week, the executive isn’t obliged to pass those extra Treasury funds on to councils.

The executive’s machinations might tend to the opaque, but if ministers have decided not to pass on the cash earmarked for councils' national insurance costs, they should at least be up-front about it.

The rates system is an effective way for councils and the executive to raise revenue. But they must do more to improve public services and offer value for money, and stop treating hard-pressed households as mere cash-cows.

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