Council tax bill - is this wild or are yours insanely high too?

Are they taking it over ten months instead of 12? That’s what my council does.

I pay £566 pa for water/wastewater, and that's for a single-person household.

My supply is metered, and I've got really stingy about how much I use. I'm hoping the bill will go down a bit when they read the meter, usually around June/July.

We’re £330/month for a 4 bed 3 bath! It’s extortionate!

Wow. I don't have children but I certainly don't begrudge paying for social care. Do you realise that a lot of the social care for children is paying for children abused/neglected to live in foster care or other placements to keep them safe.
You were once a child and unless privately educated, then other people's taxes were funding your educational at that point
Also how much do you get in pension, you may not actually be a net contributor overall. If you use the roads, nhs, get your bins collected etc you may not be paying as much in tax as the services being delivered

@ProudAmberTurtle what ia not true? The biggest spend is social care and pension schemes are far less generous now.

Those are the two options if you want to cut funding to adult social care.

Care in the home should also include house value imo.

Ours is over £300 per month. It's no surprise, although still unpleasant!

I work for my local council.

On the 15th of every month they pay my wages and then grab £200 straight back in council tax 😭

Mine is over £300 with the discount. It's gone up alot over the last few years.

Those children will one day be working in the services you need ... hospitals, shops, road workers, dentists, trades etc etc.

That’s true, I hadn’t thought about it like that.

Our borough council also gets a lot of revenue from us having to pay to park outside our houses too! I imagine those in rural areas don’t have that.

Besides the discussion is council tax which doesn't pay for schooling and nhs.

Some does go towards education and social care impacts the NHS

Yes £232 for small two bed cladded flat i can't even sell, madness

And many are on Universal Credit because admin/ executive officer wages are so low.

The Times article states that councils paid around £6.7–7 billion into staff pensions in a more recent year, equating to an average of 23.5% of their council tax revenue — i.e. nearly £1 in every £4. Some councils spent over 50% (or even more than 100% in extreme cases) of their council tax income on pension contributions.

Well the vast majority of public sector workers are not raking it in, I can assure you.

Also, I don’t have much sympathy with your shock if you don’t take notice of your bills.

That’s a sad take. Does the resentment and spite show on your face?

Depends on the council running costs - I pay more than the PP because I live in a less-wealthy borough of London, and other residents claim more and contribute less. From memory, I think the cheapest council tax is City of London because there are practically no residents (lots of business rate income though).

I do agree it should be more equal, but I don’t know how you would do that without penalising people in expensive areas. I live in a small 3 bedroom ex council house worth over £1m, because that’s just what houses cost around here. I’d be annoyed to pay more than somebody in a six bedroom mansion just because they live in Northumbria and houses are cheaper there, and obviously it would be wildly unfair on social housing tenants in a house like mine.

It's simply not fair to blame council salaries. Everybody deserves a decent salary and public sector salaries tend to be lower than those in the private sector.
Ageing populations are costly to support, whether we're talking about in-home services or residential care. And we all subsidise those who wriggle out of care home fees by bequeathing money early, for example - as we sometimes hear about on here.
We all feel the pinch from rising costs, whether it's fuel, labour, materials or food. Councils are not immune to that.

Mine as well. When I first moved here the local Council froze the tax for a few years but since then it has gone up every year. Mine was £431 last year and will be more this year

@Notmycircusnotmyotter the first payment is always a bit higher as they work out the equal monthly payments. You can always ask to pay over 12 months instead of 10 months if that would help you

And for those moaning about the salaries, I used to work for the council, left in 2022 was on £22K/annum. Crap salary and equally crap pension

In 2016-17 councils and other bodies across England paid £7.4bn in pension contributions, although it's uncertain exactly how much of that was funded by council tax.
During that period, people in England paid £26bn in council tax, which accounted for 28% of total local government funding.
If 28% of local authority pension contributions that year came from council tax, then the cost would be about £2bn.
That amounts to 8p of every £1 of council tax paid in England.

I'm probably in the "scum" category, too. I've mostly worked in the public sector and in the "third sector", delivering contracts paid for out of public sector money.

And to add to grist to that particular mill, for the last 25 years of my working life, I was doing mostly or wholly welfare rights work, so I was helping people that that poster would probably regard as even scummier than me!

An even bigger gap 😩

It’s over 10 months so £1,470 per year. Crazy.

The pension is an incentive to keep employees working in the public sector. Take that away and people would go back into the private sector and there would be even bigger issues.

There are some incredibly dedicated, hard working individuals in the public sector. Working crazy hours for terrible pay with the promise that some day, their pension will be half decent.

Rates were paid even by those who rented.

also im public sector. I work in HE. Shouldn’t we get paid then?