I HATE paying Council Tax. It's the bill I hate the most.

[flashbac]

Council Tax is regressive and unfair.

It takes more money from lower income individuals.

It has no link to the actual value of a property.

In addition to linking council tax to value, the bands also need to increase in range in order to reflect the vast difference in property values.

How can it be right that a million pound property in Westminster is the same or (often lower) CT rate than a 2 up, 2 down house in Yorkshire?

And as for the water that falls from the sky, it has to be collected, or abstracted from rivers, cleaned, and pumped right to your taps so it's always available and always clean enough to drink. Then pumped away again and dealt with.

@annacondom

And as for the water that falls from the sky, it has to be collected, or abstracted from rivers, cleaned, and pumped right to your taps so it's always available and always clean enough to drink. Then pumped away again and dealt with.

I know. It was a bit tongue in cheek.

Mine is nearly £4K pa in Cheshire. I imagine it will be over £4K in the next year or so. I live in a nice house on a fairly new build estate (less than 15 years old) but it’s worth a lot less than a friend’s 2 bed flat in a nice area of North London and her council tax is about half mine.

We can afford it now but once we are retired it’s going to be a big chunk of retirement income.

I do think the bandings in my area need re-doing. I think if they were done on house values today we would probably be in a band lower.

I may be wrong but I thought council tax was determined by working out the cost of providing services and then dividing this up into bands for your area?

That would explain why some highly populated dense councils are cheaper on a per property basis.

It's expensive but I feel I'm paying for a set of services that I wouldn't want to opt out of if that was an option.

TV licence is worse. I pay a fortune to Sky but its my choice for the channels I want to watch.

They did a council tax reevaluation is Wales, which they stopped for England. I’m sure it was supposed to be a trial in Wales which was to also apply to England, but I could be wrong.
Anyway I was proper pissed to be put up a band, where my neighbour with a bigger house stayed the same band!
www.council-tax.com/counciltaxrevaluationwales.html

Yep council tax is the biggest rip-off ever in some places. When we moved out of London our bill more than doubled (admittedly we have a slightly bigger house so that may be why) but we now get a bin collection once a fortnight instead of once a week. It drives me mad.

The poll tax wasn’t fairer. It targeted people who were already on the bones of their arses renting. People who owned property were in the same or better position. People who rented, generally the poor and less well off were in a drastically worse position. Rates were included in rent and paid by the landlord. Once the poll tax was introduced landlord no longer paid rates and tenants had to find hundreds of pounds a year extra for the poll tax. It was an incremental cost to many. Not just one charge swapped for another. Of course landlords did not reduce the rent in proportion. It basically split society into the haves and have nots.

Westminster also collects the vast majority of its income via business rates. All those bars and restaurants in the west end subsidises the residents. There are less than 1/4 of million residents in Westminster. And probably as many businesses!

Also wandsworth does have v low council tax but they don't even have wheely bins there. Still have old fashioned metal bins you have to buy yourself. I am next door in Lambeth. Not sure what else they get for their money (or don't get!)

I'm band E I think, I pay £2005 pa.

I don't think that's too bad, the local services are excellent. There are many of which I do not avail myself but it's good to know that others can if they need to and, who knows, I may be in similar need one day.

To my mind this is were the poll tax/community charge was fairer, but unfortunately it wasn't popular with large swathes of people who hadn't been paying their way under the rates system.

The tory government gave in to mob rule after the riots in Trafalgar Square, that's why we have the system we have now.

Genuine question - what do Mumsnetters think would be a fairer system for how we pay for local authority services?
(Saying "paying nothing" is not an option, unfortunately🙄)
I thought the Community Charge, more commonly known as the Poll Tax, was a fairer system in principle, but not in practice.
The current Council Tax system is also unfair, and, as PPs have said, is based on alleged property values in the 1990's.
And I think we are all paying more each year for less due to cutbacks.
However, do we really want the system to be updated, and be based on current property values?
If so, Council Tax would be completely unaffordable for many people if the idea of the banding method stayed broadly the same.
So what's the least worst option?
A local style of Income Tax?
Unfortunately, as humans we all want to have the services provided, but not to pay for them 🤷‍♀️

@PersonaNonGarter

Scottish council tax is eye watering. We pay £4K plus.

And no, the services aren’t great for that.

That includes your water and wastewater charges though whereas England pay them separately because their water co's are privatised. It's still a crazy amount and the bandings seem to make no sense, my 2 bed, not particularly large flat is in band F so only 2 bands above me yet in terms of housing stock / value I'm sure I'm much lower down the percentiles!

Most people who were renting (even in shared rented houses as I was at the time) could not afford the sudden, incremental cost of the poll tax. I was one of them and I had a full-time job. There was just no money to pay it. I’m talking about people with literally no spare money week to week. The benefits system was a lot less generous then. No working tax credits etc. Hence mass non compliance, court challenges to non-payment and serious rioting

@annacondom unless you live in Scotland that's not covered by council tax, water/sewage charges are paid additionally to the water company. The council is only responsible for road drainage.

I live in a housing association house and the thing I have paying the most (other than council tax) is the maintenance charge to have the grass and trees tended too on the green outside, I pay £18 a week as do the other 12 houses on the road (so £216) and all they do is cut the grass once a month in the summer, so maybe 5 times. I would like to know where the money actually goes, though I have asked and was given a nice list of things that they have never had to do 🤔.

We moved from one house, built 1977 to another, built 2004. The houses have exactly the same footprint. Similar estates etc. Old one was band d, new one band f.
It's flawed. Now pay 3k a year. Kind of think though, whatever they came up with as a house with 2 working adults we would end up paying the same.

Interesting question Lindylou.
I'm wondering if an increase in the rate of Income Tax would cover it, and scrap local taxes altogether. That would make savings at Council level as they wouldn't have to have a department each for collecting the local taxes.
But this would need to be done along with stringent measures to prevent tax evasion and that's something this Government would never do.
If every person, and every company trading, paid their taxes, we'd have more than enough, I suspect, to pay for social care.

When the council tax was introduced, the Tory run councils mostly had much cheaper council tax bills than Labour or Lib Dem run councils.
Wonder why...

I think London councils can afford to charge lower council tax because they get more income from business rates?

@LindyLou2020 a local income tax seems the fairest option

@Pumpkinstace

I live in a small terraced house and earn 12k a year.

My brother is in a 4 bed detached and earns 60k.

We pay the same.

can you not apply for council tax support on that income?

I fully accept that local public services have to be paid for but Council Tax is an unfair and regressive method of funding. The thing with Council Tax though is that it is relatively easy to administer, apart from dealing with Council Tax Benefit claims. Any fairer alternative would mean more administrative work and I reckon that's a major reason that there is no appetite for change. Not to mention the fact that MPs can easily afford theirs so why would they vote for a fairer system.

In many European countries the equivalent is 1% of the value of your house each year. Interesting proposal I think, but due to our high house prices it would have to be more like 0.5%, and they’d have to do a bit of a rejig to pass around the massive take from Westminster council to others in more deprived areas.

Scottish council tax is eye watering. We pay £4K plus.

Includes water doesn't it?

But then I suppose the row about the new NI levy shows us that there are some ways in which a charge on assets rather than a charge on income can be fairer?!