My advice to Lord Willetts

I'm referring to the council's somewhat controversial purchase of Birchwood Park last September for £211 million.

According to reports, rents from the business park could bring in £10 million a year for the Labour-run authority.

That could be considered a piece of clever piece of business but there is a bit of problem. The purchase of the site was conducted 'offshore' to avoid tax.

That element of the deal came under criticism from Labour's Warrington North MP Helen Jones who labelled it as 'very unwise' and said WBC should 'think again' and bring ownership of Birchwood Park to the UK.

And now the Labour Party has joined in the criticism.

A spokeswoman said: "Public bodies responsible for setting and collecting taxes in their own right should lead by example – and we don't condone anyone avoiding paying the right amount of tax.

"The next Labour Government will close loopholes to clamp down on tax avoidance."

But here's the thing, there's a massive difference between tax avoidance and tax evasion and that difference is essentially legality.

Tax avoidance is legally using the tax system and its laws to reduce tax liabilities. It may well be those methods may not have been intended by parliament but the answer that, in my opinion, is to write better laws.

Tax evasion is to escape paying taxes illegally.

As it stands at the moment, Warrington Council hasn't done anything illegal but may find itself in the firing line if Labour ever get into power at Westminster.

Not too sure about the morality of it though.

Sometimes someone comes up with an idea that is so half-baked, you can only shake your head in despair and check the calender just to see if it's April 1.

And what is it that has got me all perplexed?

It is the idea that a £10,000 payment should be given to the young while pensioners are taxed more to pay for it.

Apparently, this will bring about 'inter-generational fairness in the UK'.

According to the BBC, the Resolution Foundation says these radical moves are needed to better fund the NHS and maintain social cohesion.

Its chairman, Lord Willetts, said the contract between young and old had broken down and without action, young people would become 'increasingly angry'.

It seems to be open season on older people thanks to some fallacies about their lifestyles that have somehow morphed into fact.

Pensioners, so the story goes, belong to the only identifiable group with disposable income. They own their own homes, run nice cars, go out for restaurant meals and enjoy long foreign holidays while the poor Millennials are struggling to make ends meet and will never get to own their own home.

Pensioners, apparently, lived through a time of full employment and are reaping the benefits the young will simply never get to enjoy.

But let's just rewind shall we. Did pensioners really have it easy?

If you were born in the late 1940s, you will have lived through six recessions including 1956, 1961, the mid-1970s, the early 1980s, the early 1990s and of course the great recession caused by the banking crisis.

If you were looking to buy a house in the 1970s or 80s and were 'lucky' enough to actually get a mortgage there was every likelihood you were paying an interest rate somewhere between 10 and 16 per cent (for those of you who have only known post-2008 interest rates, that is not a misprint. Can you just imagine the chaos mortgage rates of 16 per cent would cause today?)

Then we come to the way the government has shamefully treated women born in the 1950s, raising the age at which they can claim the state pension from 60 to 65 or more almost without notice.

My advice to Lord Willetts is to go away, have another think and stop picking on pensioners.