The local tax bill

I just got a scary looking email. It was full of number codes and it came from the Government of Spain. My first thought was that it was a fine, the second that it was a scam. In fact it was from SUMA, the local tax collection agency, to tell me that a couple of new household bills were waiting for me on their website. Official Spanish is laced with over complicated and little used words. They really do need to start using plain, everyday language.

Britons living in Spain often complain about Spanish tax. I can't actually find anything on the internet that directly compares the average tax burden between countries. I suppose, in the end, there are so many variables, from obvious taxes like income tax and VAT/IVA through to the sugar tax on soft drinks, that it's almost impossible to calculate. What there are are official figures, at country level, about how much tax revenues represent, as a percentage of the total budget. For instance in the UK taxes represent 35.5% of the total GDP. In Spain that figure is 38.4%. So, in Spain, a greater percentage of the money that runs the country comes from taxation - that's all forms of taxation from tobacco duty and corporation tax through to inheritance tax. The specific gripe of Britons is that they feel the Spanish Government takes more of their personal wealth than the British one did and I don't know whether they are right or not.

Whatever other Britons might say I still take a sort of guilty pleasure when I get notification of my road tax and it's less than 20€ for the year. Our IBI which is a bit like Council Tax, for the year, in Culebrón, is 97.41€. In Huntingdonshire, the last place we lived in England, I understand the average (mean) council tax is now £1,860 per year. That's a bit of a saving, in fact it's more of a saving than my Spanish income tax bill for the year.

Our Culebrón water bill for the first six months of the current water year is 41.70€. From the detail on the bill it seems that the actual cost of the water is 0.0518636363636364 cents  - five hundredths of a cent - per litre. With all the additional costs for renting the water meter and paying towards the upkeep of the system the real cost per litre comes out at a staggering 0.0956363636363636 cents or, rounded up, a tenth of a cent per litre.

That water price reminded me of the furore there was in 2005 or 2006 when the boss of Nestlé argued that water wasn't a right, it was, he said, just another foodstuff best valued and distributed by the free market. The quote was taken out of context and used to beat Nestlé with a stick but, given their reputation for dodgy marketing and exploiting the poor, that's hardly surprising. Anyway if you decided that you wanted to buy bottled, Nestlé brand water from our local supermarket the cheapest you can get works out at 34 cents per litre - 350 times more expensive than our tap water. The cheapest, own brand,  bottled water from a local supermarket is only 112 times more expensive than the tap borne equivalent.

Just to make any British readers groan my car tax is 17.39€. The same car would cost £180 in the UK. The other bills we get locally are 60€ a year for rubbish collection and 41€ for drainage. That last one I don't particularly like given that the drains installed in the village fell short of our house by about 300 metres. We're paying for something we don't have, something tangible and real, not a shared community asset like education or road signs and that seems a bit unfair. On the other hand it's only 41€ so I can just about bear it.

______________________________________________-

Here's the, translated, email I got from the Spanish Government/SUMA

THIS EMAIL IS IN RELATION TO A NOTICE OF AN ELECTRONIC COMMUNICATION.

Please be informed that a new communication is available for CHRISTOPHER JOHN THOMPSON with NIF/NIE ***935*** as the named person with the following details:

Cardholder CHRISTOPHER JOHN THOMPSON with NIF/NIE: ***935***

Issuing body: O.A. Suma Gestion Tributaria Diputacion de Alicante, with DIR3: LA0004956

Identifier: 743506564db1b955160d

Quality: CSV-2023.2727.6758.4931

Link: This was a webpage address

You can access this communication at the Single Enabled Electronic Address (DEHÚ) of the General Access Point, available at: https://dehu.redsara.es

We provide a direct link to the communication.

Government of Spain

Equivalence

Often, when we encounter something new, we describe it my comparison to something that we recognise. A turnip?- well, it's a bit like a swede. We Britons living in Spain often use this equivalence for things Spanish. Sometimes the idea is spot on; IVA and VAT, the sales tax, is alike in all but name and rate. It doesn't work for lots of things though. The car roadworthiness test for instance, the ITV, isn't really much like the MOT but it's sort of the same and we know what we mean. And MPs are not a bit like Spanish diputados except that they are the rank and file national politicians. After all the blue whale and the field mouse are both mammals, they suckle their live born young, but they're not quite the same. Morning, afternoon and evening are different too. If the plumber says they'll be around in the afternoon then you shouldn't give up on them till about 8.30pm just like 1.30pm is still very much morning. I still get caught by someone saying we must get a drink "por la tarde", I think afternoon and they're thinking just after work.

I have great difficulty in trying to explain about the difference between British style public holidays and Spanish style non working days without misusing the word holiday. The idea I have, entrenched with me since I was a lad, is that non working days are holidays. Easter Monday and May Day are holidays and the couple of weeks in Skeggy in July are holidays too. For Spaniards a holiday is a holiday and a day off work is a "festive" day. Amongst we Britons the idea of a public holiday is that it's a part of our holiday entitlement. So, if Christmas Day and Boxing Day, both of which are UK Public Holidays, fall on a Saturday and Sunday then we will get compensatory days on Monday and Tuesday. The Spanish idea is different. Spaniards have working days and non working days. Their "non working" calendar includes certain days and anniversaries which are national non working days - Constitution Day, All Saints, Good Friday plus some regional non working days decided by each Autonomous Community and, finally, a couple of local non working days which will be different in Pinoso to the local days in say Monóvar or Elda. If the day off falls on a working day, that's Monday through Saturday, then lots of people, won't have to go to work. If the non working day/anniversary falls on a Sunday then people won't have to go to work either. So, to a Spanish legislators way of thinking, the effect is the same. Last year for instance The day of the Valencian Community fell on a Saturday. The day was marked in the calendars as a non working day but, as most working people don't habitually work on Saturdays, it made absolutely no difference to the vast majority of working people in Alicante, Valencia or Castellón. They finished on Friday afternoon and went back to work on Monday morning. It was the same with Christmas day in 2021 and January 1st 2022 was another Saturday. Father's day is a National non working day but, in 2022, it will fall on a Saturday so most people won't really notice the difference - well, except for the meal. That's why neither Mother's Day nor Easter Sunday feature as "holidays" in Spain because Sunday isn't a working day. It also means that the public days off work vary from year to year.

This idea of finding an equivalent struck me the other day when someone asked me about their Suma. Suma is a tax collection agency that was set up by the provincial level government of Alicante back in 1990. It basically assesses, bills, collects and enforces local taxes for the municipalities in Alicante Province. Suma doesn't set the taxes, the local municipalities do. So, Pinoso, our town council, uses Suma to collect Road Tax and so does Sax Town Council but the tax for the same type of cars, the least environmentally friendly, is 154€ in Pinoso and 201€ in Sax. And there you have an example - I said Road Tax but that tax here is qualitatively different to the Motor Duty payable in the UK. The tax we pay here, el impuesto sobre vehículos de tracción mecánica, is a local tax that pays Town Hall wages, the fiesta fireworks and the Christmas lights rather than the upkeep of the nation. That's one of the reasons why, traditionally, there are a lot of toll roads in Spain. Actually with the ending of so many toll road contracts and the bankruptcy of others the National Government is considering ways to raise money for road maintenance from mileage type charges through to a general vehicle duty. 

Now Suma doesn't collect in three of the five municipalities which share a border with Pinoso because they are in Murcia and the person who was talking to me lives in a village that "belongs" to one of those Murciano towns but which, generally, see Pinoso as being their town. It's not surprising that they use the shorthand of saying Suma when they refer to local taxes, "I've not got my Suma bill yet" or "When does the Suma bill come?" because, amongst other things, Suma is much easier to say than alcantillarado or exacciones municipales. Ah!, the joys of foreign living.

The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away

I always called it Road Tax and I suppose that's what it really was, in the beginning. You had a car and you paid tax that was then used to build and repair roads. It's not a principle that's applied to schools or social services but I can see the sense.  Not everybody needs roads so the people with vehicles pay. But UK road tax was abolished in 1937, long before even I was born, and replaced by Vehicle Excise Duty. This is, and was, a tax on cars, not roads, and it goes straight into the general fund.

Here in Spain I pay a vehicle tax too. It's charged by the local town hall and collected on their behalf by a tax management agency, called SUMA. SUMA is a local organisation created by most of the Alicante town halls, working collectively, to collect local taxes. The tax on the Arona for this year is a bit short of 18€. Obviously comparing a local tax with a central government tax is unreasonable but it looks as though the Vehicle Excise Duty in the UK for the same car would be £155. 

The roads have to be paid for somehow and we have a lot of toll motorways in Spain. The motorway that runs up the Mediterranean coast was a toll road for years but most of that became free at the beginning of 2020. Not all the local motorways are free though and we still have a couple of paying motorways close to us. There's one that goes around Alicante and another that branches off the Mediterranean motorway heading for Torrevieja and Cartagena. In the olden days, when we weren't confined to our home region and we could stay out after 10pm, the SatNav often warned us of tolls. I think we were paying 12 centimos for every kilometre on the Mediterranean motorway just before the toll was removed so that popping up to see pals in Altea, which only took a bit over an hour, cost around 18€ for the round trip. 

I don't like tolls much. It's not that they are inherently bad but they always strike me as expensive. On October 7th 2004 my diary entry says that my 1977 MGB GT covered the 1349 miles from Huntingdon to Santa Pola using about 200€ worth of petrol and with 120€ in tolls. MGBs are old and thirsty cars. Mine had the steering wheel on the wrong side for paying tolls on the European mainland. I got quite a lot of exercise, running around the car. The cat in the passenger seat was no help at all!

Anyway. You may have noticed that we've been having a bit of a problem with a virus. Like nearly everyone else the EU decided to print money to deal with this. They told Spain they could have 140 billion to fund a recovery plan. There were lots of conditions to getting the money, most of which I don't remember, or never knew, but the news reports always mention principals like developing modern infrastructure and being greener. Spain had to write a plan to say how it intended to spend the billions but also how it intended to help itself. Apparently the plan is only about 800 pages longer than Tolstoy's War and Peace and on, at least, one of those pages is the plan to introduce or reintroduce tolls on all Spanish motorways.

I can't imagine that the new tolls, due for 2024, will be paid at toll booths by actually handing over coins or banknotes or even virtual money but, however they track my use and make me pay I'm sure I won't like it.

Taking and keeping

I've complained before about our occasional tussles with "authority" here in Spain and how it's quite tricky to complain or fight back. It's not just the language. Some of the processes can be a bit Kafka, a bit Catch 22.

You may remember that the tax people questioned my 2014 tax returns. It cost me 118€ to defend myself, not a lot but 118€ that I could have invested much more wisely in, for instance,  throwing the money in the dust and trampling on it. Their final response after a couple of months was "we will take no further action". They didn't say "whoops" or "sorry" or "here are your expenses" and I rather suspect that we will go through the same rigmarole for my 2015 returns in a few months.

We also had some trouble with the Land Registry, the Catastro. The Land Registry sets the rateable value of houses and this figure is used by the Local Town Hall as a way of fixing the local taxes which, in the end, pay for street lights, parks and gardens and council worker's salaries. An agency called SUMA collects the tax for most of the Town Halls in Alicante province. The Town Halls sets the tax as a percentage of the rateable value. Lets pretend that rate is half a cent on the euro. If your house has a rateable value of 50,000€ then you have to pay 50,000 lots of half a cent or 250€ in local tax.

Our problem was that the Land Registry thought we owned a good percentage of our next door neighbours house. When the Catastro finally sorted this out the rateable value of our house was reduced by about three quarters. Like the tax agency the Land Registry showed no sign of regret when they acknowledged their error. With backdating and what not we have paid this inflated price six times in the last three years.

I expected that, when SUMA sent us our local rates/council tax bill for this year, it would reflect the new, revised, lower Catastro rate and that there would be a refund for those six over payments. But no. The bill was exactly the same amount as last year and they want us to pay the inflated price for a seventh time. I went to talk to the collection agency.

"Ah, well, you see on their last letter the Land Registry say that this rate applies from the day after you receive this letter". I agreed, I'd read that at the time we got the letter, Maggie had read it too, but both of us had failed to grasp the significance. We should have contested the ruling and asked for the corrected rateable value to be backdated to when the error had first been made.

I grasped at straws. "Well the bill for this year should be proportional then," I said. "No, the IBI, the local tax, is due on 1st January for the year and, on that date, the rateable value of your house was the older, higher value".

I'll see if we can fight it of course but I suspect that we are, in the vernacular, buggered. There is something immoral though in a Government Agency recognising that there has been a mistake but not refunding the couple of thousand euros that it has collected under false pretences.

Ambulance chasers

We were following an ambulance. It wasn't in a hurry and neither were we. On the back door was the symbol of the Generalitat, the Regional Government, and the name of a private firm. Along the side, in big letters, SAMU, obligingly decoded for us even in Valenciano (Servei d'Ajuda Mèdica Urgent), the English would be something like Emergency Medical Care Service. I think, though I'm not absolutely sure, that just as people in care homes wear name tags in their cardigans, writing SAMU on an ambulance says who they are and where they belong. Use SAMU or SAMUR (which is the service for the emergency ambulances in Madrid) and you mean ambulance: the sort of ambulance that comes for heart attacks and road traffic accidents and not the sort of ambulance that comes to take you for your appointment with the urologist.

Health Services in Spain are devolved to the seventeen Regional Governments. Ours, in Valencia, is called the Generalitat Valenciana. Hence the logo on the ambulance. But I wondered about that name of the private firm. Obviously there are private ambulances to move people to and from private clinics and to deal with patients who are paying through their insurance companies or health plans. Mutual societies, which work with the Social Security Department to cover work place health, might also use private ambulances. But that wouldn't be the case for an ambulance with the Generalitat logo. Google of course knew. It seems that, in the modern world, the Health Authorities usually outsource their ambulance services. So there's a tendering and contracting process for outsourced fleets of ambulances. Staff can also be outsourced though it seems that the doctors and nurses aboard the ambulances are, usually, Health Authority Staff whilst the drivers and paramedics come with the ambulance.

I know there are Red Cross, Civil Protection and yellow DYA ambulances. I'd also read a story recently, in the local press, about our Town Hall buying a new ambulance. So how did this all fit together?

I think the Red Cross ambulances are, much like the Red Cross or St John in the UK. I saw a Red Cross ambulance crew in action only a few weeks ago in Aspe. They were covering a fiesta and somebody was taken badly ill. I presume that event organisers have to cover emergency first aid and one of the potential options is the Red Cross. The DYA is another example of a charitable organisation that raises money in any number of ways, including selling its services. The DYA was originally set up to cover the shortage of ambulances to deal with road traffic accidents in Spain but, I think, it now generally operates through arrangements with Regional Health Authorities. Obviously when push comes to shove, in a train crash or terrorist attack, all the ambulances from everywhere become available. So then, what about our Town Hall ambulance? Checking back in the local press the ambulance was described as a TNA. Google said TNA is Ambulancia de Transporte no Asistido. The penny dropped.

There are two basic types of ambulances. Emergency Response Ambulances and Transfer Ambulances. Emergency Response Ambulances come in two types and with three crewing levels. Transfer ambulances come in two variations with two crewing levels. There are plenty of other sorts too, like rapid response vehicles, but I'll just stick to the principal types.

Generally, when someone calls 112 (there are other numbers too but 112 is foolproof), the ambulance that turns up will be an SVB - Basic Life Support ambulance. It will be crewed by two TES, técnicos en emergencias sanitarias, or emergency health specialists which are probably equivalent to UK paramedics. They will have spent a couple of years at college getting their qualification and they will probably have done lots of short ancillary courses. The SVB vehicles are kitted out with defibrillators, all those immobilising braces, oxygen, drips and a long etcétera.

The next step up is an SVA - Advanced Life Support ambulance. These SVA vehicles carry more medication on board than the SVBs and more sophisticated kit. The real difference though is not in the vehicles, it's that SVAs come with more qualified staff. The SVA Sanitarizada (the lowest level of SVA) comes with an Emergency Health Specialists (TES) and an Emergency Nurse. The course to become a nurse in Spain is a four year university degree course. Most SVA nurses also do a further two years masters in nursing.

The most sophisticated vehicles and crew is also an SVA but, this time, it's called Medicalizada. These ambulances are sometimes referred to as Mobile Intensive Care Units. The on board equipment doesn't usually vary much from the Sanitizada but this time the TES and the Nurse have a Doctor with them. A Spanish SVA Doctor will have done six years at university, a couple of years on a Masters in Emergency Medicine and another four years or so on a specialism like cardiology or intensive care medicine.

Away from the full blown, nobody dies on my watch, vehicles there are the two types of transport or transfer ambulance. The first of these is what my dad and his mum would have recognised as ambulances. The patient will probably be on a wheeled stretcher. Their lives are probably not in danger but they are not well. It's possible, though not likely, that the transfer could become an emergency so the vehicles are equipped with horns and lights. The patient will be accompanied by one TES paramedic and a driver. The driver may just have first aid type knowledge from a couple of months course or they might be a TES as well.

The last and simplest type, the TNA, the sort of ambulance that our Town Hall just leased, may have a first aider or a TES type driver but there is no expectation that the run will become an emergency. Often these vehicles are minibuses.

In re-reading various articles about transfer ambulances it looks as though there are often arrangements between local Town Halls to share access to the SVB ambulances. I was talking to one of my students about this and she said that before Pinoso sorted out its own local arrangements people could die whilst they waited for an ambulance to arrive from Elda, which is where our hospital is, some 28 kilometres away.

There is all sorts of legislation about how a vehicle qualifies to be an ambulance, from simple things like having the word ambulance painted back to front so that any driver looking in their rear view mirror will be able to read that they have an ambulance on their tail through to what it needs to carry, how it can operate and how long it can take to get such and such a distance.

Just one last thing. Spanish ambulances have traditionally had amber flashing lights, they've only just started to use blues and twos. Ambulances could have blue lights from August 2018 and all of them will have to carry blue lights by August 2020.

Bravery

I need a digital signature to do things online. I have one but the certificate is computer specific and so I need a new one for a newer computer.

One of the agencies that provides the signatures is a collection agency called SUMA. They're the bunch that collect our rates, water and rubbish bills. Pinoso isn't big enough to have a permanent office but they have a session here on Tuesday and Wednesday mornings in the old Casa de Cultura.

There were several people in front of me and each enquiry tends to be quite lengthy. I waited patiently but as one person came out and the next person went in I did something very Spanish. I queue jumped.

All I wanted to know was whether it was worth waiting as I suspected that I couldn't get the signature except by going to a permanent office. It took seconds and the answer was negative so I saved myself a long and fruitless wait.

But I felt very proud of myself for being so daring. Speaking Spanish across a room full of people isn't something I like doing but I did it.