Luke Murphy is associate director for energy, climate, housing and infrastructure at the Institute for Public Policy Research. This article is from the CityMetric archive: some formatting and images may not be present.
Contact us. White papers from our partners. Siemens Smart Infrastructure. New criteria for a new, smart building era. Microgrids — the future of energy management. How the smart office acts as a team player in crisis management. Privacy Policy. Hot topics The day after tomorrow: Building now to prevent future disaster. And the link to the original tax was that all who were entitled to vote would have to pay an equal share.
The then Conservative government created a rod for its own back by imposing the tax first on Scotland. Resistance turned out to be stronger north of the border than anywhere else and the national anti-poll tax movement sprang up from the streets of Glasgow, devising measures to stop bailiffs and defences to fight court cases.
With its high proportion of council tenants, Scotland was a natural home for rebellion. Council tenants had paid their rates contribution through their rent, so the poll tax was not just a replacement but a completely new tax. By the time England had its first taste, the country was already swarming with latter-day Wat Tylers.
The link between the community charge and the vote had a dramatic effect on a generation which anyway felt voting had changed nothing. The electoral register in Scotland fell more than 27, in , bucking the previous trend of year-on-year rises. The following year, it fell a further 34, The electoral roll in England fell almost 85, in , having risen more than , annually for much of the preceding decade.
The English electorate peaked at It is thought that more than a million people in Britain failed to register to vote during the poll tax era. But councils were the hardest hit. They had not asked for the new tax, yet it was their main source of self- generated income. According to figures compiled by the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy Cipfa , non-payment of poll tax in its first year in England and Wales represented And it was a problem to the end.
Reluctance to pay grew even stronger. The size of the files alone - there are nine thick manila folders compiled over 18 months - are evidence of how far the poll tax dominated government thinking.
Mark Dunton, a specialist in modern records at the National Archives, calls it a "juggernaut". Though simple in principle the tax proved to be immensely complex in practice.
The files are full of highly technical papers - many of them annotated by Mrs Thatcher. They also include a warning from April that she risked a fine if she didn't complete her own registration form on time. But the technical challenges of introducing the tax paled beside the political problems it threw up. The government had expected opposition to a measure specifically targeted at high-spending, mainly Labour-controlled, councils.
What they hadn't expected was the reaction from their own supporters, as the April date for its introduction in England and Wales drew near. In September the previous year her environment secretary, Chris Patten noted "a good deal of pressure developing" and Nigel Lawson, who was to resign as chancellor the following month, told Mrs Thatcher: "We are faced with a potentially difficult Parliamentary situation.
And she got a powerful sense of the anger among formerly loyal Conservative voters in March when a constituent of the Norfolk MP Ralph Howell wrote to her.
Mr WE Jones and his wife were in their 70s, living on modest pensions, and under the poll tax would be paying more than twice what they paid under the old system of rates, while better-off people in large houses would be paying less.
He accused the prime minister of being uncaring. In the files released today the couple's address has been redacted, though a later memo reveals they lived in a house called Dream of Delight in the village of Great Snoring.
Howell asked for a meeting. The prime minister's adviser Mark Lennox-Boyd suggested he should be granted an audience: "The meeting will be a waste of time, but I am afraid she will have to do it to keep his frustration at bay. Yet the files suggest it may not have been a waste of time, for this was the point when Mrs Thatcher finally realised that something must be done. She turned not to her environment secretary Chris Patten, who had the job of bringing in the new tax, but to her recently-appointed chancellor, John Major.
On 25 March six days before an enormous demonstration against the poll tax in London which developed into serious rioting the files contain a "note for the record" of a phone conversation between the two. Instead of the tax shining a spotlight on spendthrift local councils, she said, the government was getting the blame for high charges, and the impact was falling on those in middle income groups, what she called the "conscientious middle".
Major agreed with the need for what he called a "radical review" to find a way to cap charges and give local authorities more money, but without increasing overall public expenditure.
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