To not understand why council tax in London is so cheap

[WhenSheWasBadSheWasHorrid]

This is based on a ridiculously small sample size. My 4 bed house up north costs me £180 a month. Friends 3 bed in London is £90.

Why is it so much cheaper? A few other London base mates reported low council tax rates too (but not that low).

Is London cheaper? Why council tax when everything else is so expensive?

Don't quote me but I think the rate is also affected by the amount of non-payers as well. If you have a lot of people exempt from council tax in your area then it puts it up for everyone else.

£1395 a year. Band B. 3 bed terrace. Cumbria.

Elephantsaremadeofelements. I have lived in Wandsworth (Putney) for 30 years and raised children here too. I have never heard of a child who has not been offered a reception place in that time. Wandsworth was also one of the first boroughs to introduce a school place for every child rising 5 from September of the reception year. Primary schools are fine in the borough but not enough has been done to raise standards at secondary level and although we applied for state schools for our dd we were not able to put a single Wandsworth school on the form - although the list stopped at 2 anyway.

I can only comment on the services I have experienced but having moved here in 1981 shortly after labour lost control of the council I have only seen improvements and those improvements were rolled out very fast in the early 80s. Roads and pavements are in good order and if reported are dealt with very quickly, refuse collection and recycling are brilliant - any number of garden waste bags are collected, housing stock on the estates has been upgraded very significantly and the blocks of flats at the Arndale are incomparable to 20 years ago together with the redevelopment of the Southside shopping centre adjacent to them.

The riverside developments have been incredible, there are cycle paths all over the place, the parks and one o'clock clubs are brilliant as are the libraries and leisure centres.

I do not hear locally that services for those most in need are being cut and because I work in the public sector I would be aware if services in Wandsworth at that level were worse than those in Lambeth, Southwark, Croydon, etc..

£108 a month for a 4 bed detached house in Cornwall.

maybe because the population is much denser in London, so they are getting more per square meter, even though they are charging less per flat/house IYSWIM?

But actually I have no idea. I pay about £990pa - one bed flat.

I also thought (and maybe I am wrong) that one of the reasons why council tax was so low in Wandsworth and Westminster is because of what they can charge for parking. I though the parking charges subsidised council budgets and lowered council tax in these areas.

If Wandsworth 3 bedroom houses are really £800 pcm from the Council, that's an absolute bloody bargain. In the private sector, it's more like a median of £2,500 cpm, according to this.

We pay about £120pcm for a 2 bed flat in N. London. I didn't realise it varied so much between boroughs.

£228 a month with us, in semi-detached house in Ealing. Seems a lot to me.

London? Cheap?

I own a one bedroom flat- £100 pm CT

Pulls threadbare clothes up to chin

I'm in West Berkshire and, with the single person discount, I pay £140 per month = £1680 pa and I'm a pensioner. The Council Tax has been frozen for the second year running but still increased owing to the Police Force's and Fire Brigade's requirements.

Sorry; I should have added that I have a 4 bedroomed link-detached house.

190 a month in north west london here for 4 bed house- £90 a month is really cheap!

I lived in the "arse-end of Tooting" for many years and paid about £50 a month. I loved living in Wandsworth and as a single woman and then later a wife and mum to pre-schoolers it was brilliant. But I didn't need any services other than the usual bin collections and street lights. I think they've got about 4 council houses in the whole borough, don't they? And it costs £5,000 to park in the street for half an hour.

Wandsworth is magically cheap. Tory run council. Lambeth over the border is somehow a lot more expensive and not nearly as nice.

We are in a 2 bed house in one part of the North. My mum is in a 4 bed house in another part of the North. Our houses are worth the same but her council tax is double mine. That is because her house is expensive for the area she lives in. I assume that accounts for part of the situation in London.

I live in north london and its £175.00 for a 3 bed terrace

I had no idea we were so much more expensive here. blimey. 247 a month. suffolk. 4 bed det.

Oh and my mum pays the same amount for a huge 4 bed detached up North.

Wandsworth is magically cheap. Tory run council. Lambeth over the border is somehow a lot more expensive and not nearly as nice.

Its hard to believe Wandsworth can actually run its finances on so much less thah the boroughs around it. Something doesn't add up, it can't all be socialist waste and inefficiency.

marriedinwhite, AFAIK they all end up with places eventually (because legally they have to be given places) but I personally know several children, across several application years, who were not offered a primary school place at all when places were first given out and who had to wait months to find a place (I believe because some schools were forced to take temporary bulge classes). In January this year there were still ten pupils in Wandsworth who had applied for a Reception place in September 2011 but had not yet been placed, so it's not a problem on a disastrous scale (although stressful for everyone while they are sorting it out each year), but demographic shifts (there were 3,142 applications from Wandsworth residents for Reception places in September 2011, compared with 2,589 for September 2010) are definitely putting pressure on school provision -- numbers are running well ahead of the council's own projections made in 2009 and the council acknowledges in its own documents that it still needs to provide additional primary places to fulfil its statutory obligation (and it is drawing up plans on how to achieve that across the various geographical planning areas of the borough).

I think the difference in our experience may be because most people I know have children from 0-8, whereas your children are older and from smaller cohorts so there wasn't so much pressure on school places when they came through the primary system.

I don't think Wandsworth is badly run, overall, but I thought there ought to be a corrective to the oh, yes, it's wonderful in every respect and we have hot and cold running outstanding schools on every corner message.

£135 a month for a 2 bed flat in London for me. I don't feel that's cheap at all.

Marriedinwhite and Elephants - I will be very interested in the Reception admissions for next year. My oldest three children are 18, 17 and 15 and I got places relatively easily for them, first at Allfarthing and then, when we moved to Northcote, in Honeywell.

We moved (abroad) away from the area for 8 years, but I know that some friends had difficulties with the move to secondary; though a staggering 70% from both my DD's years went into the private sector.

I also have a 3 year old DD who is due to start in Reception in Sep 2013 and, frankly, I am starting to get a little worried. We're now Tooting Bec, so I haven't a chance in getting her into Honeywell or Belleville (my absolute preferred schools), and the two nearest to me really aren't good options. I am not Catholic (or anything for that matter), so that rules out H.G. and St. A's. As I stand at the moment I will find the pennies somehow to send her to one of the local private preps and do a reverse swap with all those who whip them into the private sector at Year 3.

Having said that, I can't knock very much else about Wandsworth. As Marriedinwhite says, the refuse collection is second to none, the roads are fixed when needed, I've never had any issues with needing anything done, but I do remain mystified as to why our Council Tax remains so fantastically low.

I paid £120ish per month for 1 bed flats in Brentford, Crystal Palace/Croydon and a shoe box 1 bed in Isle of dogs.

FrankWippery you have summed it up perfectly. There is not a single state secondary in Wandsworth to which I would be preparared to send our dc, faith or otherwise. They have let down the residents across the board dreadfully on that and need desperately to deal with it but in order to do so they need to acknowledge it. If we had not been able to afford school fees at that stage we would have had no choice but to move.