Council tax is a c**t

We rent and the council tax is eye watering so we are moving to somewhere smaller in a lower band. I understand the council tax principle, sort of, but I began to loose patience when libraries started to be closed. And their powers of recovery are insane. Absolutely disgusting. Why local authorities have that degree of power is beyond me.Edited to say I would be slightly happier if some of my hard earned cash went on road repairs. Where I live the roads are like something out of a apocalyptic film where the world has effectively ended fifty years before.

Three women in a supermarket queue. All buying the same items
Exactly the same. One is charged £20, one £60 and one £120. Charged this because of the value of their property. This is "fair" why?

I agree - poll tax makes more sense (and as a family of 5 we would be paying more).

If it’s supposed to be wealth based then this should come out of income tax, inheritance, stamp duty.

Council tax as it stands makes no sense - it’s seems like it’s a half way house between wealth tax and a standing charge. But it doesn’t work and isn’t fair.

Of course we shouldn’t all pay the same - bloody ridiculous idea! The poll tax was quite rightly derided - Thatcher and her stupid “the duke should pay the same as the dustman” bollocks.

The only fair tax is a local income tax - so we all pay proportionate to our income. But people in this country hate tax and just want everything for nothing so 🤷‍♀️

Funnily enough it was Wandsworth!

Well, no. I do dispose of most of my own waste because the fucking fortnightly bin collections are nowhere near adequate. My dc are in private school. I don’t go to public parks or leisure centres. I don’t tend to use NHS services. All very much to my detriment as the system is set up to mean if you go private for something, you can get fucked with anything else.

the roads are full of pot holes. Pavements full of weeds. Local services generally shambolic. Yet we’re taxed on absolutely everything, then what we have left we’re taxed over and over again on what we spend it on. I honestly despise this country. And if it wasn’t for DCs dad being in the picture you wouldn’t see me for dust. I genuinely have a hatred for Britain at this point.

I didn’t realise anywhere was still doing weekly rubbish collection!

We’re on fortnightly recycling and 3 weekly rubbish.

People do realise that if landlords paid council tax, then the rent will just go up to cover it anyway?

Same here - our council spends around 65% of its budget on Adult Social Care and Children’s Social Care. We’ve been lucky that all our libraries have stayed open, though with shorter opening times, but parks and playgrounds are neglected. I imagine it’s the same in most areas.

I’d also like to know where @ThisLittlePony lives and which councils are turning people away from baby groups because of their council tax band! I can see that some groups might restrict groups to local residents, but council tax band is a new one on me.

So, what does everyone propose we do instead of council tax then?
It’s easy to complain about it but how else should local councils be funded?

The change in frequency of bin collection is nothing to do with the band of your house but how different councils manage their bin collections. Most places have recycling every other week. Take your boxes to the tip or put them on Facebook selling and someone will take them.

You knew how much the council tax was going to be when you moved. If you can’t afford to put the heating on then you should have thought about that before you moved to this house.

And you can’t moan about having to pay council tax at the same time as moaning that your bins aren’t collected as often as you like. It won’t get better by not paying for it.

Yes council tax isn’t ideal, but how else should local services be funded?

Because they aren’t earning - you only get it if you are full time. And if you’re on benefits you get council tax reduction because you don’t earn enough to pay it.

The same disparities prevailed prior to Council tax. In the 80s in Wandsworth I paid £443 for a two bed flat. I then moved to a three bed house in the same borough and it was £288. The banding, value based, introduced more local consistency.

Wandsworth was then the Jewel in the Crown and due to central government subsidies (for being well run) charged rhe lowest council tax of £148 and it went down the following year. I thiught it much fairwr that my single person household paid £148 and my next door neighboirs paid £444 for three adults. Felt sorry for the poor buggers in Lambeth though!

I feel its unfair how much is varies across the country. We paid about 1 5k for our 3 bed house in London, we bow pay over 3k a year for a similar size property, with a simular value, outside London. We use same amount of services, earn the same. It's crazy!

What I don’t get is why students don’t pay council taxes. It might almost make sense if they were housed and catered for by the university, Oxbridge style, basically treated like overgrown children, but in reality they are using the same council services as all of us as well as taking up houses families could use. I’m on a street with some students and it boggles my mind their house (which generates the most rubbish!) isn’t paying for rubbish collection. And their landlord has no responsibility to pay it either! Mad.

Tried to take my child to a bookbug group locally, wasn’t allowed as wasn’t band A tax.

You expect anyone to believe that? Seriously? 😂

I live in a country where couples can be jointly taxed - it's a very regressive model which ends up creating pension poverty for women and reinforcing the gender pay gap and pretty much every sort of misogyny. Every year we're told it's going to be scrapped soon because it's outdated, but the same party who also veto legalising abortion (it's currently illegal except for narrow medical reasons but a "crime" without punishment up to 14 weeks) argue for keeping it...

Nobody has to accept being taxed as a couple but that's the same argument as saying women don't "have" to take maternity leave or go part time when their babies are little... It's a pragmatic trap which creates a spiral.

To some degree no doubt. But I think the point is that the house you are in isn't necessarily one you could afford to buy or indicative of one's wealth

Ah yes similarish thing happened to me..next door neighbour was paying more than me so they reported it and I got moved up..Thanks for that. No benefit to them, just extra cost to me..forever!

Out of their benefits....

The social contract (17th Century) means that we should each contribute what we can for the overall good. The original idea (Locke, no not that guy from Lost) was that wealth comes from mixing our labour (work) with resources to actually produce something. At no point was an increase in property values (passive earning) meant to give a person more wealth power. We understand this in simple terms as 'the work ethic'.

Obviously, the latter part of the 20th Century moved us away from this, and now we have the idea that investment = wealth power.

Concretely, in terms of Council Tax, and pretty much any other tax, this means we've reverted to the feudal system. The 'peasants' are subsidising everyone else. Given the state of our society, it would not appear to be for the overall good.

The simple solution would be to tax passive earnings. Carry out a survey every 5 years and tax increases in property value. We used to call this 'the rates'. Worked for 300 years since Tudor times.

The problem is really in the disparity - when I rented a 3 bed flat in London, I paid around £300 a year less than I would’ve paid the same year for my tiny 3 bed house I now live in. It accommodates the same number of people - in fact there were more of us in the flat, and yet because of where it was a property worth approx 4x more paid £hundreds less.

I moved the uk in 2001 and my friend explained my council tax to me. Then went on a rant about how bad poll tax was. I thought it sounded fairer as you paid based on amount of adults in the house (if I have understood it). Surely that’s fairer than a flat fee. Happy to be corrected though as it was before my time in the uk

Flats are an issue. DS has been looking, and they are in bands far above their value in comparison with houses. The ones he’s been looking at are all similar bands to our (very big) house.

We need bin collections to reduce, because we need to produce less waste. As PPs say though, bins are peanuts in comparison with social care. And those needing social care need us all to pay for it.