Council tax is a c**t

A huge portion of council tax does go on social care. I am ok with that. It is not just about elderly in care home, or disabled children. It is the adults in between. Those with learning disabilities etc. How can they self fund their care? In fact, many do to a point with their benefit payments.
The people who get care for free do so because if they didn't, they would get no care at all. It is not about punishing people who have money, it is making sure those without are looked after.
What is the alternative?

You can't force someone to look after a parent with dementia. Some need 24/7 supervision. Some people are NC with their parents, or live far away.

I knew someone who had a child in care. She had MH issues that she managed to over come. She had another child, and got her first child back. You can't make someone be sterilised. That is a very slippery slope to go down.

People disabled from birth wont have paid much into the system at all. They are the most vulnerable among us. They need and deserve proper care and dignity.
What does the a very stripped down health service look like for them? Something like a prison cell with a hatch for food and meds?

Do you know many people under 60 who have actually saved for their funeral?
To be fair, the cheapest way is already a thing for people who have not made funeral plans. That has always been a thing. Some people are actually opting for that out of choice now.

"Family allowance" 😂that term just shows you are really out of touch anyway.

I also remember the poll tax riots. No government will be crazy enough to bring the poll tax back.

I don’t know what the fair way of charging is. It means different things to everyone,
Should people pay more if they use the services? Yes I’m in favour of that. What that comes down to is adults paying for their own care. Not expecting the tax payer to pay around £1250 per week to house them in nursing homes. Or people taking responsibility for their own children.
So do we do like some other countries and say you/ your family will look after you when you get dementia?
Should we cap how much the taxpayer funds. Personally yes, I don’t think it’s fair that some people pay for care whilst others get it free.
The same with children. Parents should be taking more responsibility for their own DCs. Perhaps once you have a child in care, you should be persuade to be sterilised, both males and females.
Either way this is where our money is going.
Maybe those not paying for social care should receive very basic care.
If I was in charge I would go further. A very stripped down health care service for those who haven’t paid much into it. Those who have paid in more get priority. Those who keep doing the same thing which makes them ill don’t get seen quickly.
You haven’t saved for your funeral, you don’t get to face the same service as someone who pays. You get cremated whenever and wherever without your relatives in attendance. The cheapest way.
Parents who don’t adhere to the advice given by professionals get their family allowance taken away. Maybe it will punish the children but why should the tax payer keeping funding feckless parents.

Band A and pay £133 a month with single person discount. That is over 10 months, I live in the second most expensive council tax area in the country in a shit hole of an area that so dirty and disgusting I never invite people round

And that’s the rub. No matter how they decide to tax people, value of property, on your earnings, individually or as a household someone won’t like it and will complain.

Yes the F&G bands are bizarre where we live

exactly the same house in RM a street away and one is G and the other F

I'm ancient, so can remember paying rates, which was the system pre- poll tax.

The amount payable was based on two factors: the "rateable value" of the home, so not dissimilar to to council tax but variable rather than in set bands, and the amount payable for each £1 of rateable value.

The council worked out how much money they needed, subtracted any grants (they got some central government funding) and projected income, and divided what was left by the total sum of all rateable values in the council's area. That gave them the rate in the pound that they needed to charge. Iirc, there was no single occupier discount, but people on low incomes could qualify for a "rate rebate" which was a variable discount according to how low their income was.

Rateable values were as much of a lottery as council tax bands seem to be, and newer houses always seemed to have higher RVs than older ones of similar size. And people still moaned, just like they did about the poll tax and still do about council tax.

They were probably more reasonable especially if they included water

Yes. I can remember my parents moaning about them! Plus ca change and all that!

Didn’t we used to pay rates in the UK before the 90s?

We're with the same council. It's the exact same council doing the bins, the only thing that's changed is the band. We've only moved 10 minutes away from our old house.
My opinion on council tax remains unchanging - in my old house in Band A, I had similar frustrations about the bill. I still worried about the heating and paying for my food and I still despise paying council tax with the fury of a thousand suns. If we didn't have to pay it, life would be infinitely easier to afford. That's my opinion and your patronising response won't change that.
I can moan as much as I like. FUCK COUNCIL TAX FA LA LA LA LA.
"How else should local services be funded"? How are they funded in Northern Ireland, where they don't pay council tax? They pay domestic rates - which even includes their water bill.
Here in England, council tax goes up every year for increasingly poorer services and we just bend over and accept it.
The whole system needs rethinking and sorting out but it'll never happen bc we just accept these increases and, according to you, we're not even allowed to moan about them.
I won't be replying to you again - we disagree and that's the nature of life and the internet.
P.S. Fuck council tax.

Just think, in 10 years it'll go up 50% (not including compound....) and the services you get will be far worse... its an unsustainable system.

Not really. We pay 3.5k per year on a pretty average 3 bed house, in a pretty average area - band E.

The cost of council tax doesn't relate to cost of area. For a similar size property in London we paid about half as much as we do living more rurally.

Twelve months.

The full c/tax is £2,335, iirc.

Over 10 months or 12? Either way is still far less than than the£400 a month that a PP complaining about. And if she doesn't get a single person discount there is at least 2 of them to pay it

Mine's band C, and I pay £153 a month after the 25% discount for being the sole occupier.

Does that satisfy the objective of re-election ?

And it's telling you say "back to". Why did we move away from that initially ?

Id go back to land tax, farmers would be exempt as long as the farm land is actually farmed

The problem with a local income tax is that the same people who manage to avoid paying all the income tax that they should would also get away without paying the local tax, too. At least with a property-based tax they're more likely to pay their share.

It's much harder to hide a house than it is to conceal your income, at least for those who aren't on PAYE.

Not to hijack the thread but I wonder what a better solution is to local taxation.

It depends what you want to achieve, really. In a democracy most taxation centres around the need to get re-elected at some point. All else is moot.

Hmm mine is £120 a month. Without any benefits on a band C house ( with single person discount) Must be a big bloody house at over £400 a month council tax. Move so where cheaper

Not to hijack the thread but I wonder what a better solution is to local taxation. In USA it's linked to income like income tax I think, though I believe it also varies from state to state and some pay YOU!

The reasoning behind the poll tax was to stop people who could pay tax dictating what tax got spent on.

It was inspired by a media-led witch hunt against the "loony left" who were running councils in areas with serious deprivation where voters who did not pay tax elected councils who then raised the rates sky high.

It was essential that affordability was not taken into account, otherwise all the time and money and effort put into setting up the poll tax would have been a total and utter waste of time (something the Tories have always beaten Labour at.).

The poll tax riots were not the reason it was abandoned. That's just media manipulation. The real reason it was abandoned is because all of a sudden a ton of rich men suddenly discovered they'd have to pay for their wives and adult children living at home. And having spent 300 years managing to avoid that, they were not going to start in 1990.

Yes of course I'm so lucky to be so severely disabled to be on a sickness benefit. I'm also sure those people have more money than me

Wow, you do know what ESA is and what it is for, right?