The land of the rising Barnet? (From Times Series)

Cllr Freer, congratulations on being elected chairman of the London Councils working group. I would suggest that at the top of your list of issues facing the suburbs should be the rather important matter of over development. No political party in Barnet has a mandate to push through these massive building programmes. The electorate have never been consulted. Your duty, first and foremost, is to the voters of this Borough, not to Gordon Brown.

I challenge you to call a referendum and ask the voters whether they are happy to see this leafy green borough turn into a choking grey metropolis. Where will you plant the trees needed to soak up all the pollution generated by an extra 40,000 people? Talking of trees, I hope you remembered to plant some when you returned from your taxpayer funded club class trip to America last year.

I see you are still trying to insist that your Barnet Financing Plan (a.k.a. the Barnet Bond) will be tax neutral. This really is insulting our intelligence. For the sake of this discussion, let us assume that the government agrees to change the law to allow the council to take a cut of stamp duty revenue. Do you seriously think they will say “Oh well, less money for us, never mind.” This government does not know how to stop taxing us, and all that will happen is that they will either reduce the settlement grant further (pushing up council tax) or raise taxes elsewhere to make up the shortfall.

Tax is tax, and it matters not to the public which pocket the money is being taken from. We know when we are being fleeced and the pips are squeaking for everyone, not just the rich.

You say that the shadow local government team supports these proposals. I am more impressed by the Rt Hon John Gummer, Conservative MP for Suffolk Coastal, who has more understanding of the property market than the entire front bench (government and opposition) put together. In his weekly column in Estates Gazette magazine (19 July 2008) he called for Stamp Duty to be abolished. It is a classic Labour stealth tax that has raised £30 billion in ten years and yet, instead of joining in sensible calls for its abolition, you want a slice of it.

If the people of Barnet had wanted a tax and spend council, we would have voted Labour.

The same David Miller who cost the Council quite a bit of money over Barnet Football Club no doubt?

Dear former councillor, I mean Barnet Jane

If you did your homework properly, you would know that most of the cost of the Underhill investigation was due to the utterly futile High Court case against Barnet Football Club Holdings Ltd (which I had advised former leader Victor Lyon could not be won, but he wouldn’t listen) and legal fees for indemnities for officers and councillors under investigation. I again challenge the council to provide a breakdown of the costs. At the last count the cost of the indemnities alone was over £200,000 but I dare say it has risen again.

You conveniently forget, just as the Leader shamefully tried to conceal recently, that Mike Freer voted with his cabinet colleagues to refer the Underhill sale to the Auditor for investigation in June 2004. The minutes of the cabinet meeting are available for all to see.

The Auditor was not obliged to carry out an investigation. He could have thrown the complaint out. He could have said “I don’t think this is in the public interest” or “I do not think it will be a proper use of public money to investigate the complaint.” By law, he can only investigate a complaint if he considers that the cost will be proportionate to the matter at hand. That is his call, and his call alone. Once we know exactly how much of the reported £1million is due to PwC, then the public can decide whether they think it was worth it - and they can complain to the Audit Commission if they think the cost is too high. But for the never ending rise of the legal costs, the blame falls fairly and squarely on the Council.

The reality is that this investigation has cost more than it needed to and dragged out for far too long because the Conservative administration was utterly useless in the way it handled matters. If the tables had been turned, and a Tory Administration had secretly sold the land for a measly £10,000, I have no doubt that Alan Williams would have torn the council to pieces to get to the truth, and would probably have taken no more than 5 minutes to do so.

oh get a life mr miller. the minutes of the last Council meeting show the PWC Inquiry has cost £1m - and who made the complaint....oh that would be you????