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

The squeezed middle.

Wow. Ours is about £200 and I thought that was extortionate. How are people finding £400+ fees??!

There you go then. Everything will come as a surprise/shock if you don't pay attention 😉

Have you spoken to anyone who needs taxis for their SEN kids?
They use their car to get their non-SEN kids to school, and a taxi takes their SEN kid to their particular school, which is often not local.
A parent can not be in two places at once.

Yes don’t they and I don’t agree with the taxis

Ours is over £400 now and don’t get me started on the water rate !

We pay £239 a month for a four bed detached in a nice area (South East of England). Although it’s risen by £35 a month since we moved in nearly five years ago, I am relatively happy with our council. Lots of green space, rubbish free roads, wheelie bins, garden waste collections etc.

I compare it to when I lived in an outer London borough. It wasn’t much less for a two bedroom flat. Rubbish everywhere (I used to have to go and pick it up myself), so I know it could be worse!

It's Shetland, in Orkney it's less than 100% but still high. Both have good local services that most places can only dream of though. Council tax is not a council's only source of income which is why council tax varies so much from area to area. So, for example, in some urban areas commercial rates are a much higher percentage of that coucil's income that the council tax. Shetland has large reserves due to its historic oil and gas income (it has one of the largest oil facilities in Europe) and uses these to shore up the shortfall in income. Orkney has a high income from harbour charges, it's world class historic sites means it's a popular stop for cruise ships.

The rates vary so much partly because councils who get a lot of business rate income milk that cow instead of council tax. It’s why central London often has really low council tax.

Business rates are another killer!

Ours is £350 per month

This was how it was done before council tax.

it was called..poll tax and caused riots.

i had to pay 20% as a student. As a single parent household we were much better off when we were children.

Two adults are not necessarily using schools.

But yeah, taxing individuals makes more sense in my eyes. A couple in a 4 bed house would be paying the same CT as a group 4+ friends house sharing next door (and they would all be paying less if they split the bill). Or a childless couple be paying the same as a couple with multiple children, which I assume would be making more rubbish and will be using schools etc.

I am not really sure what the answer is.

Why aren’t all three bedroom houses, for example, taxed the same, regardless of size. Two adults in a larger house use the same roads, rubbish collections, schools etc as someone in a smaller house. I guess people could assume that a larger house equates to larger wages, but that’s not necessarily true.

Or maybe the poll tax wasn’t such a bad idea. People are saying that single people should get a bigger discount, so maybe council tax should be taxed per person, and not per house size … (runs and takes cover)

Thats mad. Mine is 160 with single discount. Small modern 3 bed terrace in SW.

That was how it was for me, single parent no child support, holding down two jobs at times to cover all the bills. Retired a few years ago and was managing ok until the cost of living crisis hit and now I feel as if i am back to the start except I am no longer young, strong and hopeful! I did my budget the other day and compared to about 3 years ago, my essentlal outgoings (food, fuel, water, council tax, broadband, phone, insurance, tv licence etc) when added up have increased by 129%. I expect that my Band A single person's council tax will be well over £2k a year before I die! I try not to think about it. .

Sorry, no. It's the top earners who don't pay enough. We pay plenty.

If there were no private schools your council tax would be even higher. They subsidise the state sector despite the nonsense Labour comes out with. The VAT policy has made things much worse for the taxpayer who will now receive lower subsidies from the private school sector.

Talk about turkeys voting for Christmas.

Just as an aside. Don’t know about rUK but in Scotland our councils are hampered by historical Labour decisions regarding PFI and equal pay for women.

I think we have it good due to the fact that we pay a one off charge for unlimited water within our CT.

I couldn’t cope with a water metre. We just use what we want, when we want it.

we are having councils being ripped of by operate companies sorting the adult social care, they are making millions out of our council tax. There are very few in house residential places.

We are also paying for council vanity projects - I live in Edinburgh and they bought in trams at the costs of milllions - toook years longer than they said it would and was way over budget. And we had an excellent bus route that went that exact same way. I wouldn’t mind paying the exorbitant amount if it was going into social care, grants to small charities, fixing potholes….. but it’s like having a second mortgage meanwhile the infrastructure around us crumbles.

It’s galling isn’t it? You only have to scan RightMove to find example after example of houses in incorrect bands.

Exactly this! I pay £360 a month on a band F. Finding egregious examples of low banded equivalent or bigger homes is like shooting fish in a barrel. I almost wouldn’t mind the high cost if it were an equitable system but it is not.

I have no chance to appeal as my home home is one of 4 designs on a small 70s development. Mine is the smallest but they were all banded the same. I have worked out that, with inflation, band f would now be 650-800k. My house is not in that ballpark.

Because £300 a month is about 20% of my income, I don’t think I should be working 1 day in 5 to pay for other people to go into privately owned care homes making a profit for their owners, or paying for private schools or taxis for SEN kids when everyone seems to have SEN these days. I think the councils could run things themselves to provide these services more cheaply.

Rather than just looking at the whole bill it may be worth considering what it pays for and which bits could be cut further? Should the spend on bins be cut, or should the disabled person down the street get less care, or should the pot holes not be filled, or should we ban random flags so the council don’t have to pay to take them down. It’s an honest question.
Who has looked on their council’s breakdown of costs.
NB no I don’t work for a council.

My annual council tax bill is less than a fortnight’s worth of income tax.