Action needed to reopen public toilets in Newport
Earlier this year, cabinet members confirmed they would spend £15,000 on exploring the reopening of public toilets, as part of 'bread and butter' budget proposals that focused on residents' key issues.
'I questioned the costs at the time – because £15,000 was what the council said it would save closing the public toilets in Caerleon (in 2018),' said Cllr Evans, who leads the Conservative opposition group in Newport.
'Clearly you've got to find a lot more money than that. It's woefully inadequate. Where's the progress?' he asked.
Local Conservative campaigner Michael Enea has called the project a 'mystery' and claimed other councils across Britain had spent sums ranging from £60,000 to £400,000 on building or reopening public toilets.
He also expressed surprise there was not more detail on public toilets in the city centre's new placemaking plan, which the council recently unveiled.
A Newport City Council spokesperson said the funding set aside in this year's budget, for the proposal to reopen public toilets, was 'sufficient'.
'Plans are progressing and further details will be made available when those are finalised', the spokesperson said, before noting there are public toilets available in 'several city centre locations including Friars Walk and the Kingsway Centre, as well as some other businesses, and in venues across the city'.
The spokesperson also said councils 'do not have a statutory duty to provide public conveniences, but we do provide them in many of our buildings and parks'.
However, Cllr Evans called public toilet provision a 'necessity' and said he had 'lost count of how many' public toilets have closed in Newport.
He argued the council should 'start' its plans to reopen some sites by looking at the commercial centre.
He said: 'The city centre functions 24 hours a day, and we need to provide that service 24 hours a day.'
The council said providing public toilets comes 'with an ongoing cost for maintenance and cleaning, and that would be significant if they were open 24 hours a day'.
'We will continue to monitor the situation in relation to public toilets more generally,' the council spokesperson added.
Cllr Evans also suggested developers could be compelled to build public toilets on some sites, as part of conditions attached to planning permission.
'It's quite easy to put as a planning condition, and something that should be an easy way of dealing with the issue – a quick win', he claimed, adding: 'The population is growing, we need to provide essential services.'
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The property values on which it is based are three decades out of date (they were last updated in 1992), so it is an arbitrary measure. And more than half of it is spent on services – social care – that it does not make sense for councils to provide. National Insurance is also regressive, in that it has an upper earnings limit, so again it is much more expensive to people on lower incomes. Capital gains tax is very high for genuine investors (people who patiently build up value in an investment over time and then crystallise the gains in one year) and very low for those who use it cynically (by taking income as capital gains purely to exploit the lower headline rate). Walk down almost any high street in Britain and ask: why does this place feel poorer and more desolate than streets in ostensibly less prosperous countries? Many of the answers can be found in the tax system. About one shop in every seven will be vacant, and almost one in ten will be a charity shop, thanks largely to business rates, which are charged on valuations that are four years out of date (and which are therefore much higher than they should be) but which are not charged on charity shops or empty premises. In the surviving restaurants, you may find that most of the people coming through the door are delivery riders, who are – despite the brands emblazoned on their bags – technically self-employed (meaning the delivery company doesn't have to pay employers' National Insurance contributions on their work). Meanwhile, large numbers of people don't pay as much as they should, or at all. HMRC estimates the 'tax gap' (the difference between all the tax for which people and businesses were liable, and the amount of tax actually collected) was £46.8bn in 2023-24. Another awkward fact: £2bn of this is estimated to be wealthy individuals, but £28bn of it is from small businesses. 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Rumours abound as to how Reeves will find the roughly £6bn the two U-turns have cost, relative to her previous plans. Wealthy investors worry she may implement an 'exit tax' to prevent the highly paid from eloping to Milan or Dubai. But this would be more tinkering, and it would not address the elephant in the room. Britain's public debt is 96.4 per cent of GDP. Our government is spending almost twice as much on debt interest as it spends on schools. The UK has very limited fiscal space and economic growth has slowed to a crawl. This is not a situation that small tweaks to the system are likely to solve. The truth is staring us in the face: the tax system needs to be overhauled. And the overall tax take has to increase. Reeves is well aware of the need for both. First, the simplifying. Start with National Insurance: get rid of it. This 8 per cent tax on work could be replaced by an additional 5 per cent on income tax. This would be a tax cut for workers. Wealthy pensioners and landlords would be furious at having to pay more, but they should pay more. Economic growth does not proceed from making it more lucrative to work less. Politically, this has the benefit of having been a Tory idea (proposed by Jeremy Hunt, although he failed to say how he would pay for it). Rather than raising employers' National Insurance as Reeves has done, many suggest getting rid of that, too, because it is a tax on having employees, and therefore effectively a subsidy for companies that use gig workers and zero-hours contracts. To change course would require another rise in income tax, but the long-term result would be higher wages. Next, taxes on property: get rid of stamp duty, which gives the government an incentive to inflate the housing market and makes it too expensive to move, preventing older people from downsizing and younger people from taking up new jobs in other cities. The same goes for council tax and business rates. All three should be replaced by a land value tax, which would be fairer, less vulnerable to avoidance and less damaging to the economy. As in Germany, this should allow for more taxes to be raised, and spent, at a local level, rather than centralising almost all spending power in the Treasury. Finally, eliminate the loopholes and cliff edges that make the system inefficient, such as the VAT threshold, which causes many small businesses to deliberately remain small in order to avoid becoming taxable. Of course, as Reeves is tired of explaining, it is easy for journalists and think tanks to present such plans; getting it past the party and the public is very different. Achieving even part of such a programme would involve a huge political fight for a government that already seems exhausted by the skirmishes of its first year in power. 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Reeves is known to be frustrated by the fact that one pound in every ten of British public spending goes to the holders of UK government bonds – including hedge funds and overseas investors – rather than on public services. She sees a progressive case for reducing the deficit, just as she has seen the need to pour tens of billions into the health service in an attempt to fix the labour market, and to rewrite the fiscal rules to invest hundreds of billions in infrastructure. She is frustrated and embattled, facing a summer of rebellion and calls for her to be replaced before the biggest test of her career in this autumn's Budget. Now is the time to be bold. Reeves and the Treasury are keenly aware that to reform the tax system would require a battle that would make the fights they've had seem trivial. For the moment, they are having a series of ill-defined squabbles instead. But this is the fight they need to have. [See also: Why George Osborne still runs Britain] Related
