The last thing I was expecting to discover on the doorstep of a Falkirk house was a 70-year-old woman crying at the near 16% council tax rise she and tens of thousands of others face next month.
Falkirk is bracing for the UK’s biggest hike in bills as the local authority faces a crisis of costs.
One councillor responsible for the increases has called in the police after receiving beheading taunts and threats of violence.
The area is facing its most difficult period in its 30-year history, while residents feel fragile and fobbed off.
Councils oversee the running of schools and social care, maintaining roads and collecting bins. They take charge of housing, swimming pools and libraries. The list is endless.
But Britain’s local authorities are cash-strapped and there are questions about how they should be funded in the long term.
Sky News went inside one Falkirk street to get a snapshot of the mood – and it was bleak.
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We went door to door on Wilson Road and first stumbled across 70-year-old Catherine Mochar.
The unpaid carer was seemingly unaware of the upcoming changes to her bill and became visibly upset at the prospect of scraping together more cash in her already extremely stretched household budget.
“It’s absolutely ridiculous,” she said as her voice cracked.
Ms Mochar looks after her elderly sister and says her care package was revoked as the pensioner was deemed suitable to deal with the situation herself.
She says she is not entitled to a council tax exemption and worries about finding an extra 15.6%.
She said: “I am a pensioner. I don’t know where I am going to get it [the money] from. It is quite scary the thought of it.”
Round the corner from Catherine’s house, we meet a family who feel like they are paying more and getting less.
Claire Hamilton and William Reid have a three-year-old son and regularly use the local foodbank to make ends meet.
“It is going to become a choice between heating the house or paying council tax. Or getting food in and paying the council tax,” Claire says.
“It is quite a jump for not a lot in return. The collections on the bins keep getting longer and longer.”
She continues: “You want to do the best by your child and obviously they are not aware of all these stresses going on in the background.”
Council tax differs across UK
A drop in the frequency of bin collections is a moan people across the UK share and feeds into the narrative surrounding local services.
Council tax rates have been frozen or capped for much of the last two decades in Scotland, but this year the Scottish government has granted local leaders the power to go their own way.
In England, a principle exists which usually prevents more than a 5% increase to council tax without a referendum, mostly to protect taxpayers from excessive increases.
It is thought the average increase in England will not surpass last year’s total of 5.1%. There are some exemptions including Bradford which is hiking costs by 10%.
But Falkirk surpasses everyone and is the UK’s most extreme case.
Independent councillor Laura Murtagh initiated the idea of the 15.6% increase which was eventually voted through by most of her colleagues.
Councillor behind 15.6% rise calls in police
She stresses anything less than the increase she proposed would have resulted in services, including education provision, being slashed.
But it has come at a personal cost.
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Ms Murtagh, who stresses she does not want to incite a further pile-on, tells Sky News she has contacted police after threats of violence and taunts online depicting beheadings.
She said: “It has made me not want to go out. It has made me not want to go to events.
“I am having a conversation with the police. They are nasty threats. There are people who have said you could do with a kicking or you could do with more than that.
“People are sharing memes where they are doing beheading memes or whatever.”
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Local leaders say their rates have been much lower than their neighbours for many years which is unsustainable as demand for services soars.
The leader of Falkirk Council, Cecil Meiklejohn, was asked by Sky News if she could justify the 15.6% rise.
She said: “It is quite a hike. We always knew council tax needed to go up.
“We know that we have to continue to deliver good quality services, and we can’t do that without increasing our revenue and the only way we have the opportunity to do that locally is by increasing council tax.”
She concluded: “We will work with people who are going to be impacted by the increase.”
