Susan Hall is a member of the London Assembly, a councillor in Harrow and a former Conservative candidate for Mayor of London
It was Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the finance minister to King Louis XIV of France, who famously claimed that “the art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest possible amount of feathers with the smallest possible amount of hissing.”
For Andy Burnham (and Angela Rayner and John Healey) London is a golden goose and he has shown himself keen to pluck as many of its feathers as possible with no regard for how loudly it hisses or if doing so will stop it laying golden eggs. The new Prime Minister seemingly has no problem swiping £100 million from Westminster’s budget or £84 million from Wandsworth or £30.5 million, in real terms, from Bromley. Andy Burnham wasn’t Prime Minister, or even an MP, last November when Rachel Reeves announced that homeowners with properties worth more than £2 million face an annual charge of between £2,500 and £7,500 from 2028. The majority of the money raised would come from London, with households in Kensington & Chelsea, Richmond, Wandsworth and Westminster paying a cumulative £270 million a year.
The fact that he wasn’t PM when the policy was announced would have given Andy Burnham an easy chance to change course. Instead, the policy is set to get worse. It was revealed by The Times over the weekend that the Chancellor John Healey is considering extending the High Value Council Tax Surcharge to properties worth more than £1.5 million, which would ensnare more than twice as many homes, with a huge proportion in London.
You might expect – especially if you have not been paying much attention – that the newly ennobled Mayor of London would be standing up for London against this cash grab. You might assume that most, if not all, of the 58 Labour London MPs will be manning the barricades and urging the new Prime Minister to think again. You might even imagine that Labour Councillors in Westminster and Wandsworth would be standing alongside their borough’s Conservative administrations in calling for the Government to think again. If you thought any of these things, then you are in for a rude awakening.
In fact, the Mayor has publicly backed the High Value Council Tax Surcharge, claiming it will mean “those with the broadest shoulders carrying the greatest burden”. He has done marginally better on Labour’s ‘Fair Funding’ changes, telling my City Hall Conservatives colleague Thomas Turrell last September that funding cuts to London were a “false economy, doing London down.” However, in the year since, Sadiq Khan has said vanishingly little about the issue, which will be very damaging to London. He has not called for the Government to think again. Despite promising to “work closely with London Councils and others to make the case for London getting a fairer funding deal as part of this process”, he has not worked cross-party to put pressure on the new Prime Minister to change tack.
Nevertheless, if Sadiq Khan has set the bar low, there are a number of Labour politicians who have successfully limboed under it. Wandsworth currently has three Labour MPs: Fleur Anderson (Putney), Marsha De Cordova (Battersea) and Rosena Allin-Khan (Tooting). All three have refused to back Wandsworth Council’s formal challenge against the Labour Government’s 40 per cent cuts to their borough’s funding. Indeed Fleur Anderson voted in favour of the Local Government Finance Report, which implemented the new funding settlement.
Worse they have chosen to back the lies of Labour Wandsworth Councillors, in claiming that Wandsworth’s budget gap, which will be £223 million by 2030 if left unchecked, is the fault on the Conservative Council and not the Labour Government. Given that the Council has only been Conservative for four months, but has found £79 million of savings in that time, and that Labour burned through half of Wandsworth’s reserves over the last four years, this is reprehensible. It is much the same story in Westminster, where the Government is taking £100m of the £219m central government grant.
The story of Labour in London is of politicians at all levels choosing to back the anti-London Labour Government over London and Londoners. Does anyone doubt that if it were a Conservative Government raiding London’s piggy bank then Sadiq Khan would be screaming his opposition from the rooftops.
Given the next three years will see the Labour Government desperately scrabbling around for funds as the UK economy flatlines, it is worrying (albeit unsurprising) to confirm where London’s Labour politicians stand. Unless Andy Burnham calls an early election, the likelihood remains that the next chance to replace politicians from the anti-London Labour Party will be at the Mayoral and London Assembly elections on 4th May 2028 in a little under 600 days. The Mayor and Labour’s London Assembly Members should know that the clock is ticking.