The potential impact of reforms to the essential parameters of the council tax

Council Tax was introduced in Britain in 1993 and represents a unique international property tax. There is a growing belief that it is time to reform the number and structure of council tax bands but such views have a minimal empirical base. This paper sets out to assess the impact on personal and local government finances, and extends the analysis to the role of the tax multipliers linked to each band. The research is based on the experience of a representative sample of local authorities in Scotland. A statistical revaluation for 2000 is estimated for the existing eight band system, and from this base a ten band system is calculated. Financial implications are then simulated for each local authority taking account of central resource equalisation mechanisms. The results indicate that increases in bands will have little impact on the burden of the council tax compared with regular revaluations. Changing the tax multiplier range has the greatest impact on local authority finances and council tax payments

A highly successful model? The rail franchising business in Britain

A crucial feature of rail privatisation in Britain was franchising. Passenger services were franchised in competitive bidding processes to train operators which were meant to function with declining subsidy. The paper adopts the framework of social cost-benefit analysis to examine rail privatisation's impact on three key groups; consumers, producers and the government. It establishes that privatisation did not achieve all the supposed benefits. Further, franchising only appears to be profitable through the use of calculative accounting practices, where by franchised train operators are portrayed as discrete business entities, whereas they are supported by very substantial, ongoing direct and indirect government subsidies

A highly successful model? The rail franchising business in Britain

A crucial feature of rail privatisation in Britain was franchising. Passenger services were franchised in competitive bidding processes to train operators which were meant to function with declining subsidy. The paper adopts the framework of social cost-benefit analysis to examine rail privatisation's impact on three key groups; consumers, producers and the government. It establishes that privatisation did not achieve all the supposed benefits. Further, franchising only appears to be profitable through the use of calculative accounting practices, where by franchised train operators are portrayed as discrete business entities, whereas they are supported by very substantial, ongoing direct and indirect government subsidies

Property ownership, resource use, and the ‘gift of nature’

Through a theoretical and empirical consideration of gift exchange we argue in this paper that those with legal interests in land have constructed property relations around a claim of reciprocity with nature. This has been used to legitimate the ways in which they have deployed their property power to exclude others, thus seeking to retain their dominion over both humans and nonhumans. In so doing, however, people with such interests have failed to understand the dynamic of gift relationships, with their inherent inculcation of subject and other, to the point where the exercise of power becomes contingent on the continued hegemony of property relations. Using the politics of recreational access to inland waters in England and Wales, we show that power—over both humans and nonhumans—is temporary and conditional in ways that are not fully theorised in most contemporary debates about property rights and their deployment on nonhuman subjects

A highly successful model? The rail franchising business in Britain

A crucial feature of rail privatisation in Britain was franchising. Passenger services were franchised in competitive bidding processes to train operators which were meant to function with declining subsidy. The paper adopts the framework of social cost-benefit analysis to examine rail privatisation's impact on three key groups; consumers, producers and the government. It establishes that privatisation did not achieve all the supposed benefits. Further, franchising only appears to be profitable through the use of calculative accounting practices, where by franchised train operators are portrayed as discrete business entities, whereas they are supported by very substantial, ongoing direct and indirect government subsidies