Taken for a ride by Conservative councils This part of England may be flat, but its taxation is on a rising gradient. Four of the 11 Tory tax-raisers, the county and three district or city councils, are in Cambridgeshire. A Band-D council tax payer in Peterborough - which plans a 2.95 per cent rise - will end up paying about £62 more next year if the hike goes ahead. Communities Secretary Eric Pickles has stormed that some of his local government colleagues are "treating the electorate with contempt" and delivering a "kick in the teeth to hard-working taxpayers." Mr Pickles has set aside £805 million in grants to compensate any council that agrees a freeze. Any authority agreeing not to raise its council tax will be paid, by Whitehall, an amount equivalent to the money it would have raised from a hike of 2.5 per cent. Mr Pickles is particularly angry because most of the "rebel" councils - and nearly all the Tory ones - have set rises between 2.5 per cent, the amount they would have got from the Government anyway, and 3.5 per cent, the amount above which voters would have to approve the increase in a local referendum. Cambridgeshire's raise, 2.95 per cent, is typical. Cambridgeshire insists taking the Pickles money - which is only guaranteed for a year - would have left it with a "£30 million financial hole" over the next five years. It says even with the rises, it will still be in the bottom seven of shire councils for overall council tax. "We will remain a low-tax authority," a spokesman said. In the last two years we have seen a 25 per cent reduction in government funding - more than the national average. The tax rise, he insisted, was "not linked to the cost of the guided busway." Mr Pickles is not impressed. "They should have the courage to put their hikes to the vote and justify the rises," he said. For Cambridgeshire's Tory councillors, the standard of living has been a key consideration - their own standard of living, at least. At the same time as they planned millions of pounds in cuts, dozens of redundancies, and not long before they voted to increase council tax, they also approved an increase of 25 per cent in their own allowances for attending meetings. A spokesman protested that many councillors had been "struggling" on their previous pay, and claimed the rise as a victory for democracy. It would make Cambridgeshire "far less likely to experience a democratic deficit in terms of attracting people to stand for election" and would break down barriers that "deterred people from diverse backgrounds" from coming forward. The rises were only stopped after it was spotted that the council had not followed correct procedure. Undeterred, Cambridgeshire has come up with a scheme that would raise councillors" pay by a slimline average of just 19 per cent. The county is also planning a "furniture tax," with a £315 charge for pubs, cafes and restaurants that want to put tables and chairs outside their premises. And in Ely, the district council wants to charge motorists for parking in the streets as well as increasing its own share of the council tax. Ely's population is only 18,000, but 12,000 people signed a petition against the charges. "We are about to have a huge Sainsbury's opening with 500 free parking spaces," said Andrew Olley, spokesman for the town's traders" association. When you make changes of this kind, drivers vote with their wheels. These plans would change the whole nature of what is currently a very vibrant town centre. The proposal scored a whole page of condemnation in the recent government-sponsored review into high streets by retail guru Mary Portas. "The council has shown no appetite for listening to traders," Ms Portas's report said. The Ely Traders Association's initial attempt to hold a meeting at the council building was thwarted by a response that they would need to insure for £5million public liability cover in order to hold the meeting. There is no indication that the council is listening to public opinion. The council leader says this is a "misrepresentation of the facts," but the charging proposals remain. The "white elephant" in the room, however, as the Cambridge MP Julian Huppert has described it, is the guided bus. It was meant to open in 2009 with a predicted cost of £115 million, with all the money coming from central government grants and developers. Instead, after a series of floods, delays and construction disasters, it ended up opening in August 2011 and costing 60 per cent more than that. The council is currently suing its contractor, BAM Nuttall, to avoid having to pay the overrun. Legal fees in the case alone, all likely to fall on council taxpayers, have been budgeted at more than £5 million. And if Cambridgeshire loses, it could be £90 million out of pocket. Still, it has made journeys quicker and more frequent, right? Not exactly. The old express service from St Ives to Cambridge, along the admittedly congested A14 main road, used to run every 20 minutes and take half an hour. The new, improved service runs every 20 minutes and takes, er, 36 minutes. The scheme has brought extra buses to Cambridge from a park-and-ride site just outside St Ives. Locals do seem to like the scheme, but the council's promise that 3.5 million of them would use it in the first year seems unlikely to be fulfilled. Amid great hype, dutifully recycled by the local papers, about how the service was "exceeding expectations," the millionth passenger was carried on January 12 - a level that equates to 200,000 passengers a month, or just over two-thirds of the promised annual level. Meanwhile, in a move the council insists has nothing to do with the busway project, all other subsidised bus services across the rest of the county are to be axed to save money. Tory councils, it seems, don't always cost you less.