Lord Mayor should sell Council limo's £75,000 registration number - LibDems

2.36.48pm BST (GMT +0100) Mon 31st Jul 2006

Selling the WE 1 number-plate would painlessly raise an extra £75,000 for the Council

Westminster's Lord Mayor is being urged by local Liberal Democrats to sell his Council limo's £75,000 registration number, WE 1.

The LibDems had the WE 1 registration valued by independent experts, who placed the value of the unusual number at £75,000.

Liberal Democrat Sophie Service, who is contacting the Lord Mayor, Conservative councillor Alexander Nicoll, to ask him to sell the registration number, said:

"Given that local taxpayers paid over £90,000 in 2003 to buy the Lord Mayor a highly luxurious Rolls Royce Park Ward limousine, the least he could do would be to sell WE 1 and pay back some of that cost.

"The £75,000 that would be raised by this sale could be used to improve local services or, indeed, to keep the Council Tax down. Given that Westminster Conservatives have increased their share of the Council Tax by more than a third in the last four years shows that they need all the help they can get on that score.

"Westminster's Conservative councillors need to remember that every pound they spend on themselves is a pound that has to be paid by local taxpayers and which cannot be spent on local services."

She continued, "Right now the local Liberal Democrats are checking up on how the Conservative councillors are spending money on themselves. It is not proving hard to find wasteful spending, like a dozen bottles of wine at each Council meeting and foreign trips to the Far East and North America.

"Now we are finding ways to generate income without placing additional financial burden on local taxpayers. Selling the Lord Mayor's £75,000 number-plate is one example. I am confident that we'll find more."