To be pissed off we won’t get the £150 rebate

[Usererror1999]

I feel like the rebate is giving with one hand and taking with the other. But now I also realise that as we are in band E: we aren’t getting the rebate at all! So it’s just “take” from us. We already pay a higher amount of council tax and we aren’t high users of council services

We aren’t rich: but we do have a fairly decent house that we make other sacrifices to afford. We work hard and pay into a pension and pay off our mortgage in the hope that we’re fairly self sufficient in old age. This just feels like a bit of a slap in the face.

@Usererror1999

I don’t think the “less council tax” would make up for the costs of moving.

I don’t actually agree with council tax bandings: I think a tax on income or by household or overall wealth would be fairer. Because my house was worth x in 1991 seems a bit random to determine I pay more in council tax

Hahahahaha.

Margaret Thatcher tried that. It was called the Poll Tax. You might like to look it up and see what happened.

@Usererror1999

DH and I work full time too... but £55k actually works out at £27.5 k each which is below Average salary

It is higher than the average household income.

@NeesAndToes but I thought this rebate was to ‘help’ people to pay towards rising fuel bills, not rising council tax.
The council tax system is just being used as a way of delivering the ‘help’ so it still means students are missing out.

The idea is that everybody who is of average means (in a Band D house) or below will get it, and those better off than that won't need it as much.

We all know that it's a very crude way of blanket-assessing it, and can be extremely unfair - like with so many government schemes - but that's the way they've chosen.

If they had total confidence that your CT band was directly linked with how well-off you are, they could/would have given a sliding scale of rebate e.g. £120 for band D, £140 for band C, £160 for band B and £180 for band A; but this would just shine even more of a light on how unfair it is to many people. basing it on such an arbitrary system, with a huge amount of variables.

It will probably mean that most of the most desperately poor WILL get it, as not many of them will live in band E and above homes, but you're right that it is a massively flawed broad-brush approach, which will exclude a lot of people who will also be really struggling financially.

Feel your pain. I tried to get my band looked at as I literally scrape in the E band. Single garage and 1 parking space but because the square footage of the house is 5% more than the band D 40yds away they’re saying they won’t budge.
I don’t really see how £150 will help people who are making the choice between heating and eating. Maybe sort out the big fuel companies making so much money so they’re incentivised to keep pricing reasonable!

Ach doesn’t it al need paid back in dribs n drabs anyways? The fuel one?

Fuck it OP I qualify, I’d rather not bother tbh .. seems pointless as I don’t see Life getting any cheaper to the point where I’ll be buzzing to pay back £200

We’re using less - no kids, no need for social services. All we use is refuse collection and roads. BUT we live in a house worth £600k and have above average incomes so it’s only fair that we don’t get a subsidy we don’t need.

Council tax pays for a lot more than roads, refuse and social services. It also pays for police, fire, parks & recreation, environmental health, trading standards, registry offices and local elections.

We’re band E in a tiny terraced house because properties have all been rebanded here

@ENoeuf

Council tax banding needs to be revisited every five years or something. We are band E and the band D houses next door are bigger and better thanks to extensions and improvements.

That is the real problem. No government has dared to reform council tax in England. The Welsh government is due to have a consultation on reform later this year and I think there were some minor reforms in Scotland. The system is different in Ireland where they kept the rates.

Given the rise in property prices since 1991, it is ridiculous that council tax bandings are based on property prices in 1991. That is why the refund is unfair. It should have been linked to income.

One common marker of household poverty is families with a lot of children - and the likelihood is that many of them will of necessity have to live in a bigger house, which is more likely to be in band E or above.

They will miss out, whereas a theoretical very wealthy childfree couple who spend so much of their time abroad on holiday/business and on world cruises that it's not worth their while maintaining anything more than a small, cheap flat in the UK for the few weeks a year when they're at home would get the full rebate.

@Crinkle77

We’re using less - no kids, no need for social services. All we use is refuse collection and roads. BUT we live in a house worth £600k and have above average incomes so it’s only fair that we don’t get a subsidy we don’t need.

Council tax pays for a lot more than roads, refuse and social services. It also pays for police, fire, parks & recreation, environmental health, trading standards, registry offices and local elections.

The point I was making is that we as a household use very few of the services on offer. We don’t need a subsidy of £15 a month.

Council Tax is a strange beast indeed - because more public services need to be provided in poorer areas, the poorer areas have higher CT Bills.

Many of the lowest wage areas have also had some of the harshest CT Support benefits since LAs had the choice to choose how much the poorest had their CT Benefits reduced.

Swings and roundabouts - it is for me every month - I earn £600 in a good month and the next month the local council wants at least £100. I'm lucky to have a mortgage of only £250, but that isn't accounted for in any 'benefit' calculations.

So it's really tight for some of us and that £150 is helpful, though obviously some begrudge it - back to the centuries old trope that it's the poor's own fault for being poor.

OP you pay a higher council tax because councils need funding to provide the statutory services like social care, highways, education, refuse collection, development control, building regs and then there are contributions to fire and police too. It doesn't matter how much you use it, it needs funding and council tax is a means of doing so. You knew upfront that your house was a band E when you purchased it and you went ahead because it would be affordable to you.

My biggest annoyance with council tax is that multi million pound houses owned by the richest people in the country only pay marginally more than the rest of us. It's not progressive enough and I would absolutely support a mansion tax when tiny bedsits are being charged at a band A.

They had to do it somehow and they decided on council tax bands. Pretty sure we won’t get it worth et but if you live in that kind of house then £150 is a drop in the ocean . It used to bother me everyone got child benefit regardless let’s just the leave the payouts to those who really need it and we thankful if we don’t .

@Usererror1999

I feel like the rebate is giving with one hand and taking with the other. But now I also realise that as we are in band E: we aren’t getting the rebate at all! So it’s just “take” from us. We already pay a higher amount of council tax and we aren’t high users of council services

We aren’t rich: but we do have a fairly decent house that we make other sacrifices to afford. We work hard and pay into a pension and pay off our mortgage in the hope that we’re fairly self sufficient in old age. This just feels like a bit of a slap in the face.

So let’s see with council services

Do you have bins emptied?
Do you drive? They are responsible for roads
Do you use the pavements? They are responsible for those
Do you use leisure facilities which are normally subsidised by the council
Have you kids? Using schools?
Do kids use the play areas? Normally owned and run by the council
Do you have a recreation area near you, a large, or anything? Likely to be council owned and maintained
Do you have street lighting? Owned and run by the council

There’s probably a load more things they do that actually that you probably use without realising it

Until CT is an equitable charge across the country then the whole system is unfair. I am a band c house, as is my parents - I pay £300 more p.a then they do. Their house nowadays is worth a lot more than mine despite mine being a massive 3 bed detached and their's a 3 bed semi (with a very small 3rd bedroom)

The banding is a pile of rubbish too - there is absolutely no way on earth that my current house was worth less than my previous house which was a band D. (and more so in 1991)

Is everyone in bands A-D getting it. Or just those on universal credit etc?

@Toddlerteaplease

Is everyone in bands A-D getting it. Or just those on universal credit etc?

Everyone.

I think it’s good that they’ve made it per household rather than per person - that would have been yet another unfairness to single adult households

However I also agree it’s unfair to go by house band, as it’s no real indicator of wealth, or how much the cost of living increases will affect a person

@Chloemol I said I wasn’t a higher user of council services: therefore I’m at a loss why I should pay more than other people who use the same (or more) council services.

@LikeALeadBalloon agree that it absolutely needs funded. Don’t think it’s right that I have to pay more into funding it than other people

We live in a band D house that we bought when we had only one income and one child, we’ve since extended the house as we’ve had another 3 children. This is not a brag and I wouldn’t tell anyone in RL this big our household income is 130K + a year we don’t need the £150 I’d rather it went to a family who really need it. The council tax banding isn’t a fair way of doing it. My opinion is there’s no fair way but anyway, prices shouldn’t be allowed to go up this fast.

I grew up in a council house with one electric fire in the living room, we played a game of scrapping the white fluffy mould off the bedroom walls. That and the black mould, who knows what we were breathing in. I remember my parents always in emergency credit with the meter, it always running out, it always being so cold on the house, being told to hurry up in the shower. It’s bloody miserable and no child on 2022 should be having to grow up like that.

@Smallkeys £150 is not a drop in the ocean for us!

I’m my part of Scotland a band D house is potentially worth about £180- 200k in a good area,

Fifteen years ago I moved from a band E house to a band D house and paid an extra £15k for the privilege. An anomaly caused by the fact that my house was in the first group of new builds in a tiny farming village in 1978 and the homes must have been valued base on the old village houses as their only comparator. Many new homes have been built now and all are Es and Fs.

Our house is probably worth c£280k and we earn a joint income of just over £70k. It does feel unfair.

[quote Usererror1999]@Chloemol I said I wasn’t a higher user of council services: therefore I’m at a loss why I should pay more than other people who use the same (or more) council services.[/quote]
Because that’s how society works. If you’ve got kids in school you’re getting more out than you’re paying in for that alone.