Conservative promises just don't add up. How can they be trusted to govern.

“How can the Tories offer a Council Tax freeze while spending upwards of £1.5 million on rubbish?”

The Conservatives’ uncosted manifesto commitment to “reintroduce weekly collections of household rubbish” would actually cost £1million in cost of collection and at least another £500,000 in landfill tax in 2010-11*, rising to £750,000 by 2013, says Labour leader Jo Lovelock. And £1.75 million a year is the equivalent of nearly another 3% on Council tax.

And, she adds, “On top of this and other equally uncosted schemes, the Tories would have you believe that they would freeze Council Tax!
“To freeze Council Tax this year”, she says, “the Tories would have had to identify £1.5 million in savings - and they couldn’t do that. Their pledge on rubbish more than doubles that target, and they are asking the people of Reading to believe they could meet that. They really are a shambles.

“And though they are out on the streets campaigning for the election of a Tory Government in which George Osborne is promising ‘swingeing cuts’ pretty well across the board, they are not breathing a word about those cuts here in Reading. So they’re a dishonest shambles too.

“This is a fantasy manifesto,” she concludes, “from what has over the years been a fantasy opposition. An opposition whose commitment to getting Council Tax down this year was shown when they failed to turn up for the main vote! It’s the same old Tories, trying to have it all ways, and they are just not fit to run the Council. Or the country.”