Direct Services
Council Tax Gone • Itemised Bills • See What You Pay For
Community Parks • Route-Based Roads • Reusable Containers
Manufacturer Recycling Fees • Volunteer Social Care • Visible Costs
The Principle
Council tax is an opaque lump sum. A household in Band D pays approximately £2,000 per year. Where does it go? Nobody knows. The bill does not tell you how much funds the police. How much funds the fire service. How much funds bin collection. How much funds parks. How much funds the CEO’s pension. It is a single number that arrives once a year and demands payment without explanation.
When the police bill goes up 20%, it is invisible — hidden inside a 5% council tax increase. When the fire service is cut, the saving is invisible — absorbed into the general fund. When millions are spent on consultants, outsourcing, and management restructuring, it is invisible — buried in a budget that no resident reads because it is 200 pages of incomprehensible accounting.
BUILD will abolish council tax and replace it with itemised direct services billing. Every household receives a bill that shows exactly what they pay for: police, fire, ambulance, waste collection, libraries, and street infrastructure. Every line is visible. Every cost is accountable. Every increase is explained. The citizen sees the bill and knows where every penny goes. If the police line goes up 20%, they can see it and demand to know why.
You have the right to know what you pay for. Council tax hides it. BUILD will show it.
Pillar 1: Emergency Services — Direct Per-Household Bill
1.1 — How the Cost Is Calculated
The total annual cost of policing, fire, and ambulance services for each region is divided by the number of households in that region. The result is a per-household direct charge that appears as separate lines on the bill: one for police, one for fire, one for ambulance. The calculation is published. The total cost is published. The per-household figure is published. Everything is visible.
Example: if regional policing costs £500 million per year and the region contains 2 million households, the police line on every household’s bill is £250 per year. If fire costs £150 million, the fire line is £75. If ambulance costs £200 million, the ambulance line is £100. The household sees: Police £250 + Fire £75 + Ambulance £100 = £425 for emergency services. Currently, that figure is buried inside £2,000 of council tax alongside parks, libraries, pensions, and consultancy fees.
1.2 — Population Growth Buffer
The per-household calculation includes a growth buffer — a modest margin above current cost to account for population growth. As the National Capacity Audit (Immigration Charter, Pillar 2) tracks population changes, the emergency services allocation adjusts annually. If the population grows, the cost per household is recalculated. If it shrinks, the cost per household reduces. The bill reflects reality, not a budget set five years ago that nobody updated.
1.3 — Low Income Protection
Households where all adults earn below the £20,000 tax-free threshold (Tax Reform Charter, Pillar 1) receive a direct services discount equivalent to the current council tax benefit. The reformed benefits system (Benefits & Welfare Charter) ensures that nobody faces a direct services bill they cannot pay. PIP recipients receive an automatic discount. Pensioners on the £1,500 state pension receive a discount. The protections follow the same auto-trigger model as PIP entitlements — the system knows your income, the discount applies automatically.
Pillar 2: Waste — Bin Cost per Household
2.1 — Transparent Collection Cost
The cost of bin collection per household appears as a separate line on the direct services bill. The household sees exactly what it costs to collect their bins every week (Waste & Materials Charter, Pillar 1 — weekly collection). If that figure is £80 per year, they see £80. If the council switches to automated collection (Waste Charter, Pillar 7) and the cost drops to £60, they see the reduction. Transparency creates accountability. Accountability creates efficiency.
2.2 — Non-Recyclable Product Fee
Any company that manufactures or sells a product in the UK that cannot be recycled by UK domestic recycling infrastructure pays a Non-Recyclable Product Fee. The fee is per-unit, calculated to cover the cost of landfill disposal for that product. If a company sells a product in packaging that cannot be recycled in the UK, the cost of disposing of that packaging is borne by the company, not by the household whose bin it ends up in.
This creates a direct financial incentive for manufacturers to design recyclable packaging. Every non-recyclable product costs the manufacturer more. Every recyclable product costs nothing extra. The market shifts because the economics shift. The manufacturer that switches to recyclable packaging saves money. The manufacturer that does not, pays.
2.3 — Reusable Takeaway Containers
Takeaway food companies will transition to reusable containers with a deposit-return model. A pizza delivery arrives in a reusable plastic box — durable, washable, food-safe. The customer pays a £1 deposit on the box. They return the empty box to the store, to the driver on the next delivery, or to a collection point — and they get the £1 back. The box is washed, sanitised, and reused. One reusable box replaces 50+ grease-soaked cardboard boxes that contaminate recycling loads and go to landfill.
The £1 deposit is low enough that nobody minds paying it and high enough that most people bother returning the box. If they do not return it, they have bought a reusable container for £1 — which they can use for food storage, leftovers, or the next takeaway. The cardboard pizza box — the single most common contaminant in household recycling — disappears.
Pillar 3: Parks and Green Spaces — Community Maintained
Parks, village greens, and community green spaces will be maintained by the community through volunteer programmes rather than by council grounds teams. The Japanese school cleaning model (Education Charter, Pillar 1.3) applied to public spaces: the community maintains the space it uses, because it belongs to the community.
Volunteer mowing rotas, planting groups, and maintenance teams replace paid council contractors. The council provides equipment (mowers, strimmers, tools) and waste disposal. The community provides the labour. The cost drops dramatically. The sense of ownership increases. And the vandalism problem reduces — when the person who planted the flowerbed lives three doors down, the teenager who kicks it over is accountable to their neighbour, not to an anonymous council employee who will silently replace it with public money.
For areas where volunteer maintenance is insufficient — large municipal parks, sports pitches with specialist maintenance needs, heritage gardens — a small parks allocation remains on the direct services bill. But the village green, the pocket park, and the community garden are maintained by the people who use them. That is community, not outsourcing.
Pillar 4: Roads — Route-Based Contribution
4.1 — Not Per-Mile
Per-mile road charging requires tracking every vehicle’s movements. That is surveillance. BUILD will not track where you drive (Life, Liberty & Freedom Charter, Pillar 4 — no surveillance; Motoring Charter, Pillar 5 — no mandatory black boxes). Road maintenance funding does not require knowing where every car is. It requires knowing which roads need maintenance and collecting a contribution from the people who use them.
4.2 — Route-Based Annual Contribution
Road maintenance is funded through a route-based annual contribution linked to registered vehicle address and declared commute route. The principle: if you drive the Bristol–London corridor daily, that corridor costs more to maintain than a village lane in rural Kent. Your annual contribution reflects the infrastructure your commute uses.
Drivers declare their primary commute route (verified by employer confirmation, the same mechanism as the commuter fuel split in the Energy Charter). The contribution is calculated based on the distance band: local (under 10 miles) pays the base rate; regional (10–50 miles) pays a medium rate; national (50+ miles) pays a higher rate. No tracking. No per-mile logging. A declaration, an annual payment, and the revenue is ring-fenced for road maintenance on the corridors that generate it.
Non-commuters (retired, working from home, non-drivers) pay nothing for roads beyond the base vehicle registration charge. If you do not use the road network for commuting, you do not fund commuter road maintenance. The people who use the roads pay for the roads. The people who do not, do not.
Pillar 5: Libraries — Centrally Funded
Libraries are essential community infrastructure. They provide internet access for people who have none (connecting to the right to offline in the Liberty Charter — the library is where the offline person goes to access services). They provide books, study space, community rooms, and a warm, safe public building in every town. They are not optional. They are not a luxury. They are funded centrally, not through the direct services bill, because their value is national, not local.
Library funding is ring-fenced within the central government settlement. It cannot be raided by the council to cover other budget shortfalls. The library stays open because the funding is protected, not because the local authority decided it could afford it this year.
Pillar 6: Social Care — Community, Not Agencies
6.1 — Community Care Model
Adult social care is currently outsourced to private agencies that charge £20–£30 per hour and pay their care workers £10–£12. The difference is profit for the agency. The quality of care reflects the wage: rushed 15-minute visits, high staff turnover, no continuity, and workers who are too exhausted and underpaid to provide the care the vulnerable person needs.
BUILD will develop a community care model alongside the agency system. Trained community volunteers — vetted, DBS-checked, and supported by professional social workers — provide non-clinical care: companionship visits, shopping assistance, meal preparation, transport to appointments, and the human connection that a 15-minute agency visit cannot provide.
This does not replace professional care for people with complex needs. It supplements the professional system with a community layer that provides the time and human warmth that the agency model strips out. The person who visits the elderly neighbour three times a week to check on them, make them a cup of tea, and have a conversation is providing care that no agency can replicate at any price. BUILD formalises this, trains the volunteers, and creates a structured community care network that wraps around the professional services.
6.2 — Meals on Wheels — Cooked in Your Kitchen, Not a Factory
Current home-meal provision ranges from locally cooked hot meals at around £10 each (such as Age UK’s freshly cooked service in Maidstone) to frozen ready-meal packages costing £6–10 per day. In both models, the food is prepared elsewhere and delivered to the home. The doorstep contact is brief — a handover, not a visit. Three meals a day from a frozen provider costs approximately £140 per week, £600 per month, or £7,270 per year. For frozen meals. Reheated in a microwave. Eaten alone. Everyone in this sector already knows the doorstep contact has value — providers advertise it. BUILD simply takes that principle further: instead of a brief doorstep handover, fund time in the home to cook, check in, and preserve independence.
BUILD replaces the delivery model with a cooking model. A community volunteer comes to your home three times a day and cooks real food in your kitchen, from real ingredients, while you sit at your own table in your own home.
Breakfast: 20–25 minutes. A proper fry-up — sausage, egg, bacon, toast, beans, a cup of tea. Or porridge. Or eggs on toast. Whatever the person wants, cooked fresh. Not a cereal bar and a carton of orange juice.
Lunch: 10–15 minutes. Something light — soup, a sandwich, a salad. Prepared quickly from fresh ingredients in the person’s own kitchen.
Evening meal: 30–60 minutes. A proper dinner. Shepherd’s pie, roast chicken, fish and vegetables, a stew. Cooked from scratch. Served on a plate. Eaten at a table. With a person present who can sit and talk while it cooks.
The meal is the mechanism. The welfare check is the outcome. Three visits a day means the person is seen three times a day. If they are unwell at breakfast, it is caught at breakfast — not three days later when the neighbour notices the curtains have not moved. If they have fallen overnight, the breakfast volunteer finds them at 8am, not the postman on Thursday. If they are lonely, they have had three human conversations today instead of none.
The cost comparison is devastating. Current frozen meal services: approximately £600 per month for three meals a day. BUILD’s model: raw ingredients for three meals a day for one person cost approximately £25–30 per week — roughly £130 per month, or £1,560 per year. The difference is £5,700 per year per person. The frozen service costs nearly five times as much as buying real food and having a volunteer cook it in your kitchen. BUILD is not buying a meal. BUILD is buying somebody’s time to stay, cook, talk, notice whether something is wrong, and leave a person fed rather than merely serviced.
Volunteers are trained in food hygiene, basic nutrition, and safeguarding. They are DBS-checked and supervised by the community care coordinator. They are not professional chefs. They are neighbours who can cook a fry-up, make a bowl of soup, and roast a chicken — which is all that is required. The person receiving the service chooses their meals. The volunteer cooks what they are asked for, not what a menu planner in an office 50 miles away decided everyone should eat this week.
Pillar 7: Mental Health — NHS Funded
Mental health services are funded through the NHS (NHS Reform Charter) and the Treatment Charter’s PCSA framework, not through the direct services bill. Mental health is healthcare. It belongs in the health budget, delivered by the health service, to the clinical standard the health service sets. Removing it from council budgets — where it is perennially underfunded because it competes with roads, bins, and libraries — and placing it firmly in the NHS ensures that funding is proportionate to need, not to what the council can spare after it has fixed the potholes.
The Bill BUILD Will Deliver
Council tax is abolished. In its place, every household receives a direct services bill that shows exactly what they pay for. The figures below are a worked example — a Band D household in Maidstone, Kent, for 2026/27, built from the published county, borough, police and fire figures. A different borough, band or year produces different numbers by the same method:
Police: £285.15
Fire & Rescue: £99.81
Ambulance: not yet derived
Waste disposal: £98.24
Waste collection: £37.61
Local environment & health: £31.01
Parks, specialist facilities: £17.92
Community services & heritage: £4.84
Democratic services: £5.13
Parking revenue: -£17.78 (a credit that reduces the bill)
Total: £561.93
The ambulance line is not yet derived. It depends on the South East Coast Ambulance Service annual operating cost and Kent’s share of demand, and neither figure has been entered yet, so the total above excludes it and is understated by that amount.
Every figure here, the same classification across all eight bands, the sources behind each number and the assumptions still outstanding are set out in the companion, The Kent Direct Services Model, at https://builduk.club/policy/charter/direct-services-model/ — where the full spreadsheet can also be downloaded and re-run.
Every line visible. Every cost accountable. Every increase explained. If the police bill rises 20%, the household sees it and demands to know why. If waste collection falls because the council switched to automated trucks, the household sees the saving. The opacity that allowed councils to hide waste, mismanagement, and consultancy fees inside an incomprehensible lump sum is gone.
Roads are funded by the people who use them, through route-based contributions, with no surveillance. Libraries are centrally funded and ring-fenced. Mental health is NHS-funded. Social care gains a community volunteer layer. Parks are maintained by the communities that use them. And manufacturers who sell non-recyclable products pay for the disposal their packaging creates.
You have the right to know what you pay for. Council tax hid it. The direct services bill shows every penny. If they waste your money, you can see it. If they save your money, you can see that too. Transparency is accountability. Accountability is the point.
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BUILD UK
builduk.club
August 2026
Download this charter as a document (.docx) — the paper as written. What follows is the same text, readable.
Companion: The Kent Direct Services Model → — every pound of a Band D bill classified, with the sources named and the gaps declared.