Lessons not learned: Tories stick £1.8m bill on schools with solar panels
Business rate changes are a big setback for solar projects in state schools, critics say [Image: Echo/Getty Images/Cultura RF].
The whole point of putting solar panels on public buildings was to make it cheaper to run them – not to provide a new revenue stream for a greedy Tory government.
Clearly, schools and other buildings run to provide public services/public benefit should be exempt from this business rate rise.
If you have a Conservative MP and/or Tory councillors on your local school’s governing board, get in touch and demand to know why they are supporting this.
New research suggests schools in England and Wales which have solar panels installed will be landed with a £1.8m bill because of business rate changes that have been branded ludicrous and nonsensical.
More than 1,000 schools installed solar power in recent years to address climate change, educate pupils and provide a crucial new revenue stream to help squeezed budgets.
But figures from 74 education authorities that responded to freedom of information requests show 821 schools with solar will together have to pay an extra £800,000 a year in business rates from April because of taxation changes. Assuming similar installation rates across the 174 authorities in England and Wales, that climbs to a total of about £1.8m.
Source: Schools with solar panels face £1.8m bill due to business rates rise | Environment | The Guardian
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Tories can’t abide anything from which they cannot enrich themselves at public expense.
The aim is to financially cripple schools so that they can claim public education can’t deliver.
I do hope people wake up in this country.
This document: Margaret Thatcher’s 1982 cabinet papers “the longer term options” spell out how they have privatised the public sector.
https://skwalker1964.files.wordpress.com/2016/10/cab-129-215-6.pdf
Idiots ….. not a jot of common sense amongst the lot of them. Eton never had common sense on their carriculum …it was the word common that put them off.
Hence a government of educated morons.
A real low-baller
This isn’t just about revenue, which will further harm many of the organisations that the Tories are already breaking (so that they can privatise them), it’s also about the deal with the Chinese and the French over nuclear power. How can they rip us off for electricity, when we’re making our own?
Schools for the masses MUST fail, as MUST their healthcare! We can no longer support the ever closing gap between them and us. Successive ministers have done some stirling work over recent years, in widening the gap, lowering standards, and increasing PFI but we must NOT look to our laurels! The Common man can be somewhat resourceful when pushed, so perhaps it is time now for a “natural” disaster?
Taxing these solar panels in any school is disgusting enough but the thing that gets me riled is the fact that the public (stupid name) schools get charitable status. That is no more than Tories, whose kids go to them, chortling as usual at the plebs.
Tories are ideologically antagonistic to all forms of renewables, doubtless because so many Tories have interests in dirty energy, hence their steamrolling of fracking. Their collective mindset is mired in a Victorian Steam Age. It’s not about the piddling amount of money involved, rather the desire to bankrupt the fledgling solar industry.