AS thousands of North Yorkshire council tax payers wait anxiously to hear how much more they will have to pay in the coming financial year, a taxation watchdog has produced some devastating figures on the rapid growth in salaries for local government civil servants.

The Taxpayers' Alliance carried out an investigation into middle management pay rates on local councils and came up with the fact that the number receiving more than £50,000 a year has increased nine-fold since Labour came to power ten years ago.

This costs the average council an extra £4 million a year, a national figure of almost £2 billion, and puts many local government employees on higher salaries than MPs.

These big pay hikes are just one of the reasons why council tax bills have soared, particularly in rural areas.

The Government has for many years been diverting its grants away from the shire counties to inner city areas - where the majority of Labour voters live.

Policing in rural areas has become more and more expensive because of the large areas covered - North Yorkshire is the biggest administrative county in England - and its cash needs have doubled in the past five years despite the fact that many police stations have closed.

And hundreds of new regulations introduced by bureaucrats in both Whitehall and Brussels had added a huge burden to local government administration.

Craven District Council, which covers a large area of the Yorkshire Dales, has just been forced to buy 15,000 new "wheelie bins" at an estimated cost of some £750,000 to take waste paper in line with new directives from the EU - a move which has caused outrage to many council tax payers.

One former Craven District Councillor, who quit after many years because he was no longer prepared to work to meet almost impossible government targets, told Daelnet: "The councillors get all the blame when the taxes go up but the main cause is demands that the government makes without supplying the extra funding to meet the costs."