WHETHER it’s potholes in the road, less frequent bin collections or an increase in council tax - Herefordshire Council usually bears the brunt of complaints.

But sometimes the finger is pointed at the council when it has actually little control over the matter.

Our guest editor Anthony Murphy has put questions to Herefordshire Council leader Tony Johnson in a bid to bust myths and set the record straight.

AM: When businesses close, people often blame the council for charging ‘sky-high’ rates. What is the difference between rent and business rates?

TJ: Rent is whatever the owner of the property chooses to charge a tenant.

Most of the properties in Hereford city centre are owned by people other than the council, although the council will own most of the land on which they sit.

Rates however are set by the valuation office in central government and our job is simply to act as collector.

We don’t set them.

AM: What is the difference between a councillor and an officer and how are each paid?

TJ: An officer is employed by the council to do a specific job and that job will have a rating and there will be a range of salaries that apply to that rating.

Councillors, however, are elected.

We are not employed by the council.

It’s a public service job. Ward members – there are 53 in total – get elected and receive a basic allowance. If the member has specific responsibilities there are Special Responsibility Allowances (SRA) that are attached to that.

AM: What sort of budget cuts have you faced over the last couple of years?

TJ: We have a complete budget of about £330million in total. That includes things like direct schools grants. Effectively, large parts of this are simply a conduit. The government has to give money to schools, it comes to us and we give it out to the schools.

You take all of those things out and we’re left with about £145million a year over which we have some discretion.

And between 2010 and 2020 we have to take just over £80m out of a £145m budget.

Central government funding starts going down quite rapidly – we lost another £9m last year and we have to find another £23m between now and 2019 so what we do is we go into two things.

First to get as efficient as possible and look at reducing jobs, disposing of buildings etc.

You’ve then got to look at ways of delivering the services you have to provide. Is there a cheaper, more efficient way of providing a bus services or a refuse collection service or a day centre or health clubs or sports facilities or general maintenance for buildings.

Even then you still find you’ve run out of money before you get to the end of the list of jobs. So then you’ve got to start thinking about what things can we actually cut?

The bottom line is there simply is not enough money to do all of the things that councils have historically done. And we can argue and gnash our teeth until the cows come home but that inescapable arithmetic is just that – inescapable. There’s no way around it.

AM: Are there any other myths you regularly hear about Herefordshire Council that you’d like to clear up?

There’s a general assumption that our roads are worse than anywhere else. It’s simply not true. I spend a lot of time talking to people who do the same job as me for other councils and they’ve got exactly the same problem.

Potholes are not a myth, they’re a fact, but that it’s worse in Herefordshire than anywhere else – that’s a myth.

You’ll also sometimes hear this assumption about how much councillors earn. The public often confuse the councillor with a director. If you look at all the comparator councils in terms of what we pay our councillors it’s way at the bottom. But people assume that you’re making a fortune because you’re a councillor