I was enraged when I read the Daily Echo headline “Pay up to save vital services”.

Hampshire Council leader Roy Perry has suggested that council run services could be saved from cuts if residents were willing to pay a fee to use them.

This, he says, could mean locals paying as little as £1 to use services such as tips.

How long will it be before that £1 becomes £2 and so on and so on.

But the real question is - what have our civic fathers been spending our hard earned council tax money on?

Council tax, which never really did a good job replacing the hated poll tax, has soared over the years while services, including wheelie bin collections, have dwindled. Hence the increase in fly tipping blighting our environment.

If councils had been in the private sector the knife would have been taken to what has been gross overmanning.

For too many years local authorities have been allowed to empire build with sky high salaries for council bosses, generous town hall pension schemes and extended holidays.

A major shake up is long overdue and perhaps then council taxpayers will get a better return for their money without having to dig deeper into their pockets.

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