As Swindon Council considers a possible 13.1% council tax rise, MP Michael Wills calls for referendum.

SWINDON MP Michael Wills is calling for a referendum to decide the town's council tax.

Mr Wills, the North Swindon MP, believes that giving the people the power to determine the borough's destiny is the only way to break the deadlock and destructive feuding.

He is "sick to the teeth" of the buck-passing and says that councillors are whistling in the wind when they keep huffing and puffing about going to Whitehall with a begging bowl for more cash.

"They are wasting their time and what's more, they know it," he said in a scathing attack on Swindon's Conservative administration.

"What they're trying to do is create a diversion to hide their own failings. It's an irrelevancy and obscures the real issue."

Mr Wills wants the cabinet to publish exactly how it plans to spend taxpayers' money during the next financial year, indicating what level of tax it will have to levy to achieve that, and then to publish it in the form of a binding referendum.

"It would be a straight yes or no vote," he said. "If the budget is rejected, then the council would have to go back to the drawing-board and produce another one and so on until it's acceptable to the people who are going to have to foot the bill."

Mr Wills said that the result of the budget should be unconditionally binding and the council ought to be brave enough to trust the people it serves.

"The root problem is that council tax in the south west has been relatively low for many years and successive administrations, not just the Conservatives, have ducked the issue of raising it to a realistic level.

"They don't like the public's squeals, so they blame the Government. They can't do that any more now the Chancellor has announced more money for Swindon. What I won't stand for is the unfair accusation from opposition politicians that I haven't been fighting Swindon's corner. That's a lie."

Swindon Borough Council Tory leader Mike Bawden (Old Town and Lawns) dismissed Mr Wills' demand for a referendum as "a spark of imagination from someone living on another planet".

"Milton Keynes held a referendum and it cost them between £70,000 and £100,000. He is saying we should not just have one, but keep repeating the exercise until we get a yes vote. By that time we'll have to hike the tax even further to fund the referendums.

"A referendum just isn't feasible. It has to be run by the Electoral Reform Society and we need a budget settled by mid-February. It just couldn't be done in that timescale.

"I've already contacted the town's two MPs and I have a meeting with Michael on January 16 and Julia Drown on January 23, which demonstrates the level of co-operation and collaboration of the council's administration.

"Our beef has been with the Government, not with Michael or Julia."

The announcement that Swindon will receive an extra £1.2 million means that the total grant for the borough from the Government for 2004/05 has now risen from £124,923,000 to £126,118,000. This is an increase of 5.2 per cent from last year.

Swindon's share of the cake from the Government has now risen by £6.26 million from 2003/04.

Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott has said Swindon council tax next year should be kept to "low single figures", even though finance officers are still recommending over 10 per cent.

mlitchfield@newswilts.co.uk