Council tax very unfair to single people

[Lettuceandtomatoes]

The council tax for my area is £1800 full whack, a single person 25% off. I pay £140 a month which is ok until I realised the three adults next door are paying £60 pounds each and a couple paying £90 each. So why this inequality aimed at single people, picking up the tab?

YANBU. It should go on household income

How does Ireland fund social care? My grandfather and his second wife (she was Irish and they retired to her hometown) did end up using social care. There was certainly some of their own money involved, but I don't know what the Irish state covered.

If you’re living in a 4 bed detached house in a leafy suburb you should pay more than someone living in a one bed flat in a high rise.

It's because they have to share a home and you have your own home to yourself.

If you want to pay less per person in council tax you could either get a lodger in, or alternatively move into a houseshare?

People who don't have children still expect a person younger than them, that someone else has raised, to feed and wash them in their dotage... so unless childfree people plan to head to Digitas as soon as their faculties start to go, the least they can do is contribute to childcare with their taxes.

So parents won’t need care workers?

“They have to share a home” 😆😆😆

there is always room for a pony. you just have to get a small one

You don’t pay based on the risk though, otherwise should smokers pay more? Or people cooking with gas?

I'd very much love to have a dignitas option available here in the UK as i have no desire to ve kept alive bed ridden and needing 24hr care for yrs ...that is not a life for me. Since I won't have any to potentially rely on for help I'm saving away to ensure I can afford the best care for myself and as per the new rules my assets like my house will pay for my care too. It will be quite some time before thay money runs out and your children will be paying for me.

But as I said I don't begrudge my taxes helping families I do when there is a lack of understanding that it's tough for single people and we don't get alot of help and yes it would be fairer for it to be 50% off council tax. Yes it would be much fairer that your bot bottom of the list for help if you lost your job and your home. That families and other groups have always consistently been prioritised and it's time some priority and fairness was given to single people.

You have the same amount of bin collections and other public services as a house with 2 or more people, yet still get a discount.

We live in a tiny two bed back to back terrace and when we bought it they hiked it up from band b to band d! It was advertised as b as that's what it has always been but the sale triggered a refresh.

You don't have the same amount of rubbish or use the same amount of services. In my case, I am (as a single person) paying 50% more than the family living next to me.

Don’t ask me how the banding works, I’m in a 3 bed house which is band B (still pay over £200/month though) after moving from a 2 bed flat which was band D. No, it wasn’t a fancy penthouse either.

Some of the most deprived areas in the country are in London. Plus the population density is greater, so the overall costs are split amongst more people, hence CT can be lower. I think there is also a link to business rates - so in somewhere like Westminster with plenty of bars, restaurants and shops, the domestic CT is relatively low.

I don’t see how reevaluating the bands based on today’s house prices would make any difference. You’d still have bands of properties in each area and some people would pay more. It’s not like all band A would be in London and all band E in rural NE.

If we’re arguing about services tied to council tax, I could argue that as DH and I work outside of the home for the majority of the day, we don’t accumulate as much waste as a single person who WFH. Any argument could be made up as most people believe they pay too much for anything!

Even if we paid per household for things like rubbish (no discount) and per adult for things like social care, then single occupants would still be better off.

Better still to pay for social care from progressive individual taxation.

Well, the money for pensions comes from the next generation of workers, so it’s not quite as simple as ‘I’ve saved so I’m not using your kids’.

That’s the real reason we have policies designed to encourage people to procreate - we need another generation to come after us. The kids become the workforce and wealth generators that make companies more profitable to make the pension pots grow and pay the various taxes that keep our country functioning.

There’s a huge worry at the moment that we are not having enough babies, and will end up in big trouble (or importing our young).

People love to whine about people with kids without realising that they are, quite literally, everyone’s future.

Well people in couples use less state funded care as they often care for each other and older people with children do often need less state funded care as their children pitch in to do at least some of it.

If council tax was renamed 'dwelling tax' or something and was only based on the property one lived in, with no discount for single occupancy, I wonder if it would be contested by people living alone in the same way. It would be a cost like rent or mortgage payments or buying/leasing a car.

Sorry, got band A & band E the wrong way round and the edit button is only active for 5 minutes.

The general waste only gets collected every four weeks here anyway, I barely fill a quarter of the bin (and that's after I got the council to swap a standard one for a small one). I don't put my recycling bin out every week. Or even every other week.

Personally I'd prefer it if we were charged by weight, like in Ireland, though I realise that morons would just use it as an excuse to fly tip so it wouldn't work. In fact it would be even better if we had communal bins like in Amsterdam.

I don't think it would be contested in the same way if it didn't include social care. Maybe the occasional complaint about less rubbish or fewer people using the library.

People's housemates aren't going to be caring for them in their old age yet they pay less towards social care.

there are economies of scale though. The bin truck still only needs to come once to that property, street lighting is the same, etc.

I am going to assume that 50% is on the property and then the other 50% is because at the time it was introduced the tax is based on 2 adult households. CMOs (aside of student housing) weren't really as much of a thing (I think) as they are now and as the council tax calculations haven't been revised for yonks (ever?) they are still working on that assumption. So based on that, a 25% discount for a single person household seems fair. Based on that same family who moved in in 1991 and having kids, as they grew up - fair. If they are (as so many are) adults still living at home but earning money, then to keep up the fairness they should probably be paying 150% of the council tax. Because the discount for single people calculates that one person is 25% of the tax.

thanks to pp for pointing out the difference between CAPEX and OPEX - unless you work with those terms a lot i think most people don't know about that so it does seem daft not to invest income into repairs.

I think everyone is mad at the wrong people, though. vote for better government. Although I'm not sure who that might be in the uk. Ask your local MP what they are doing about council budget allocations. Keep pressing for an answer, what their party will do to restore council funding.

Just as long as big properties pay more and small ones pay less then that's fine by me. Better to base it on land use rather than the current arbitrary system.

Why as a single person do you need the same size house as 3 adults?

As mentioned above it’s 50% property tax 50% people.