Council tax is a c**t

In all fairness, the lower your council tax band, the more money you are likely to take out of the tax system.

The people in higher bands will most likely be in employment, and over council tax E/F, will probably be net earners.

The council tax takes no account of your income either. OK you can argue that of course people in the higher council tax bands should pay more as they live in a bigger house, but there are many anomalies. No one will reform the council tax though, too much of a controversial issue. We're Band E and it will probably be about £3k for 2026/27. Our neighbour's house, which is larger than ours, is only Band D. But we wouldn't query our Band in case theirs went up rather than ours coming down. Not a good idea for neighbourly relations! But council tax is an unfair mess. I don't think they'll be changing it anytime soon.

Personally I think adult social care, which accounts for a large amount of council tax, should be paid for by central government from general taxation, that would alleviate the burden on councils. In a generation's time anyway it will be even worse, when there won't be so many self-funders as less people will be homeowners.

Sunak boasted about taking money from impoverished inner city councils and redistributing it to richer Tory voting areas.

And that’s the problem. No government is going to put up income tax because everyone loses their shit every time it’s suggested and then complains about the state of public services in the next breath.

Evil 🤦‍♀️

Social care is the highest proportion but SEND is the fastest growing. There is every possibility that unless we get control of the SEND budget, it could overtake social care.

But they could only revalue our house because we’d extended - if we hadn’t, our house would still be band F even with the annexe (which has its own council tax listing).

It is what it is, we can afford it, I’m mostly cross that the specialist annexe builders didn’t warn us …

I meant since Thatcher. I’m a childless couple and don’t mind paying a tax for others children and adult social services. But the way it is done is massively unfair and I can’t see how anyone can argue that council tax is a fair tax.

George Osborne and David Cameron made sure that the poorest (Labour voting) councils would get the harshest cuts to central funding. That needs to be put right again.

They're not though.
The new ones have been completed under 5 years and the tenants are already being relocated to address the damp/leaking issues they're having. Absolute sham.

Central government should pay for EHCPs and SEN provision.
We should do away with locally elected councillors with their vanity projects and death knell investments in property, and just have civil servants running the show. That or have fewer of them.
Pare local government back to the essentials and let light into its workings.
Now that local newspapers are a has-been the corruption and entrenched “computer says no” vibe in my local council is everywhere.

Because council tax is nothing to do with the amount of people living in a property. Which would actually be fairer!

Other countries fund that via PAYE and do not have council tax.

Ireland fair significantly higher in standards of living.

They don't pay council tax and their services are funded by PAYE. In addition, their infrastructure is light years ahead of the UK. They also don't pay water rates, and the quality of the water is also superior. The UK is like a developing country is comparison.

They wouldn't get them and would be surrounded by the rubbish that everyone chucked on the street, their children would be uneducated and they wouldn't be able to get any social care for disabled or elderly relatives.

Maybe something like council tax is good thing after all?

Yet another thread about people complaining about having to contribute to society and expecting others to pay for them......

And I’d be the first at the barricades. It was a grossly unfair tax.

Why do so many children have EHCPs nowadays? Surely there could be a crackdown on that to save money?

It's not about owning the asset, it's the services you access in the community.

But if you can build a granny annexe to house another person, it seems completely fair to pay an extra £100 a month tax.

So be it. Let the chips fall where they may. People can only be pushed so far.

There'd be riots again if they tried

The fact that there is little agreement on what the problem is with the current system nor what would be a better or fairer solution pretty much explains why no one is rushing to fix it.

The government needs to be able to collect taxes easily. Generally using the systems they have. People taxes and wealth taxes are difficult to collect. In the case of the former the solution was to link it to voting rights, hence Poll Tax. Which was an ideological issue for many people who refused to pay on principle and rioted over it.

As to establishing wealth, many really rich people don’t hold a lot of personal wealth and have armies of lawyers and accountants to hide it for them. There aren’t that many of them and there aren’t even that many fairly rich people. Which is why you will end up with a property tax not unlike one you have at the moment and the burden will fall on the so called better off. The line for defining better off is laughably low for income tax and it will be for a property tax or a person.

The other issue with a local tax is that economically active or wealthy areas have low spending and high revenue. This leads into the problem of contribution versus benefit. A good system would be built on near universal benefit and universal contribution. When it isn’t people become disgruntled and divided.

We have terrible public services and a lot of people who don’t contribute whilst the majority of tax burden falls on a group of people described as “better off”. Which just means easy to collect taxes from. I guarantee you that the billionaires of Westminster won’t be contributing more because they are impossible to tax on a local basis.

Yes I have a 2 bed grr flat ( bottom half of house type) is band C. The 3 bed houses in my road are also band c

Thatcher did touch it and it cost her the keys to number 10. I could ask why we (a couple) pay more for local services than the family down the street with three kids in school. Obviously I don’t ask that because I understand the concept of collective responsibility for society. MN is full of Thatcher’s children.