The old adage that the art of tax collecting is about plucking the maximum number of feathers from the goose with the minimum amount of hissing is never more pertinent than now.

The public finances are deteriorating and the Government is in dire need of more revenue, ie, taxes. Unfortunately the goose, the public, does not much fancy the idea of having its feathers plucked. It already feels ruffled, what with energy, food and oil costs soaring, house prices in freefall and access to easy credit slammed shut.

So taxes are a no-go area, as Gordon Brown has discovered. In turn the Opposition, smelling electoral advantage, seeks out taxes wherever it can find them and promptly blames the Government, sending the goose into a hissing fury.

Take bin taxes as an example. Although most householders are unaware of this, taxes on councils for the domestic rubbish sent to landfill rise steeply from this year to reduce the amount sent to the diminishing number of holes in the ground. To reduce these costs - and prevent them from becoming an added burden to council taxpayers - councils need to increase their recycling rates.

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The Government is about to trial incentive schemes with pilot councils charging extra for those households recycling least and offering rebates for those that recycle most. These schemes have been interpreted by the Opposition as bin taxes, with ministers blamed for creating an “army of state bin bullies”. It makes great headlines but is hardly conducive to a grown-up discussion about taxation. There again the Government has only itself to blame.

Last year when the Lyons review into town hall funding recommended giving councils more tax-raising powers, ministers ran for cover when they should have done the opposite. They should have granted local authorities sweeping new powers on collecting taxes, thereby being in a position now in recession-hit 2008 to maintain that tax rises are “nothing to do with us, guv”. After all, there was a time when the Government was invariably blamed for interest-rate rises, but once the decision was given to the Bank of England, interest rates ceased to be a political issue.

The issue of passing taxation from central to local government is not new. In 1990, during the deeply unpopular poll tax, the head of the Audit Commission, Howard Davies, made a presentation to the Prime Minister on how to get out of the hole she had dug herself. He suggested that responsibility for collecting vehicle excise duty should be transferred to local government and that in cities this should be set higher on environmental grounds. The revenue could be used to reduce the poll tax. And, as he added, “some of the opprobrium attributable to higher rates ... would be attracted to local councils”. The idea was never taken up and the poll tax was later bailed out by an increase in centrally-collected VAT.

But just think if ministers had abandoned centralism and let town halls collect not just council tax, but other taxes, such as business rates, vehicle excise, petrol duty, tobacco tax, all of which are locally based, letting councils keep part of the revenues as they do in Japan.

Instead of being stretched on the rack over taxes, ministers could then pass the blame elsewhere. The goose would still be hissing, but no longer in Whitehall's backyard.

Michael Burton is editor of The MJ

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