High rate of rate payers

Treasury Minister Eddie Teare says we’re doing better than our neighbours when it comes to local authority charges.

This morning in the House of Keys he faced a question from West Douglas MHK Chris Thomas about how the Treasury benchmarks itself for efficiency.

Mr Teare said the last data available showed we’d paid more than 99 per cent of our rates – compared to 97 per cent for England’s community charge and 95 per cent for Ireland’s local property tax.

And he added with such a good collection rate, making more efficiencies isn’t high on his department’s list of improvements: