Council Leader explains Council Tax proposal

What twaddle ! Cut salaries of senior and middle management of Moray Council and cut services that few people actually benefit from than increase the council tax for everyone! Its an easy option to milk more money from the tax payer than make decisions on cuts.

What a load of rubbishy. 18% and your employers have had a 1% pay rise or frozen for the last 2years. Stop wasting money on trying to push through the Elgin by-pass. It was scrapped and then started up again, that is a waste of time and money, and you now expect the people of moray to stump up 18% when you already have the biggest increases in rent as well. People in moray are getting wage cuts or even losing their jobs due to the turndown in oil, all you are doing is adding to this misery. You lot should be looking at yourselves and see where you are squandering your money, contractors to do gas servicing when it's cheaper to pay your own employees more.

This won't be a popular move, but the reality is that there is no other choice other than to raise council tax except to cut services which have already been decimated over the past five years. The idea that the council has money to burn and can easily save money on frivolous expenses is a fallacy - the easy savings have already been found, and £11 million in cuts would result in greatly reduced standards of frontline services or maybe even the discontinuation of services altogether. Practically every other local authority in the UK is facing the same pressures and some are even struggling to deliver their legal obligations such as road repairs, libraries and street cleaning, which proves that Moray is in this position because of government cuts, not profligate spending. The council tax has not risen for nine years, and no other household expense has remained frozen in cash terms for so long. To put this in perspective, inflation is currently 0%, and an 18% rise in Council Tax wouldn't even push inflation above the Bank of England's 2% target.