Sir.-A recent edition of The Gazette featured a letter from Cllr Adam Carew, advocating the replacement of the council tax by a local income tax.

His argument was based on the proposition that the former is an unfair tax because many electors will have difficulty meeting the next demand.

But that is an example of the muddled thinking which makes assessment of political parties' policies difficult.

If refuse collection was privatised, the dustman would charge per bin emptied. His charge would be based on cost plus profit. He would not ask each customer how much he could pay, but would have to ensure that most customers could afford his services.

The council charges in this way for car parking and many of its other services could be charged on a similar basis.

Such charges could not be considered unfair.

My point is that a progressive local income tax would be a further redistribution of wealth and would have nothing to do with the establishment of fair charges for services rendered by the council.

A further redistribution may be desirable but politicians should not hide policies behind meaningless verbiage.

In his short history of local government taxation, Cllr Carew omitted that the poll tax replaced a property tax (the rates) which had been in existence for many years.

Broadly speaking, under this system, the larger the house you lived in, the more you paid, no matter how many people lived in each house.

This might originally have been thought to produce charges roughly in line with services used and ability to pay.

Under the poll tax, every adult paid, which would seem to be right as one property might have only one occupant when the next house had five.

However, this produced such large increases for many households that opposition to the tax became great and the council tax was brought in, effectively returning to a property tax similar to the old rates.

The Government seems to have caused increases in local taxation by reducing central funding and we are now promised further increases with the next property revaluations.

Perhaps Cllr Carew could ask why a council tax payer should pay extra because the supposed market value of a house had increased - a change that has no advantage except when moving or borrowing money?

He might also question the morality of hiding increases in central government expenditure by forcing local councils to raise the money.

-R S Gates, Woods Corner, Cliddesden.