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?

For some reason they can't fit a meter.

I realise this isn’t the point of the thread - but I only realised last week I’ve been paying full price for two years 🥹 I just assumed I’d sorted it when I moved and clearly haven’t. Cry

The only way for single people it seems is to take on higher mortgage and move to those places with lower council tax . One way or the other .

I am now lost😊. What point are you making?

No I'm not talking about bills. Bills are what happens after take-home. People make various arrangements for them. I'm talking about tax - the money that goes out of your wage before you start spending it on bills and everything else. Wrt council tax in particular, single people pay more of it than couples do. It's not a bill, you can't choose to live more frugally in order to pay less of it, you just have to hand over what the state tells you to and if you're single the state will demand - on pain of prison no less - 50% more than it demands from people in a couple.

You can backdate the claim. I did this successfully a few years ago.
Contact your local council for details on how to do this. 😁

In my dad's case, it's a 4 bed semi with a garage and a decent garden.

They tried a fairer way a while back where every adult pays the same as opposed to it being per property as now. It didn’t go down well …🤷‍♀️ #PollTax

There is nothing wrong with the principal of Council Tax that a few tweaks wouldn't sort out but what is very wrong is the cuts to council funding from central government.

How on earth can this Government cut NI taxes (which proportionately benefit higher income households) yet take back far more from poorer families and single people in the form of council tax increases???

Because it's based on the property not the person. (with a little softening for single people)

The Conservatives tried a "per-person" local tax, which was fundamentally fairer, as most of the local costs are proportionate to the number of people in the house. EG it costs more to dispose of the rubbish of 10 people than it does to dispose of 2, regardless of the value of the property. Same with most other local council funded services.

But, it meant lots of people were unhappy paying a tax that they previously hadn't have to pay. (an some people (voters) being happy at paying less tax)

This ultimately resulted in the poll-tax riots in March 1990, which brought down the government and ushered in the system we have now.

Taxation is often unfair with people paying disproportionately as in your case, same with income tax.

If you want to blame anyone, blame the outcome of mob-rule in the 90's.

This really annoys me. For 50 years DM got a couple discount by going on holiday with DF. Now as a singleton she doesn’t, and feels she’s being overcharged.

She isn’t. Couples get a discount because they bunk up- less cleaning, fewer rooms, fewer sheets.

Sometimes you are overcharged for holidays as a single person. I’ve looked at quite a few holidays in the past where the total price for two people would be, say, £1000 (so £500pp) but for a single person it’s £1250.

Or they charge the same price (eg £1000 for both situations) but the single person gets the shitty room.

Holidays is a bit like people Complaining that August is hiked up ripping off parents.

When in reality that’s the prices they need to charge to cover the costs and make a profit due to not being full the rest of the year. They rent out the rooms cheaper to get what custom they can out slide the holidays.

Two people in a hotel are more likely to spend more cash as well even in the little inside shops and such yes two will also drink and eat more than one (if your looking all inc) but the hotels will of balanced up the costs of losing a portion of shop/arcade customer vs what someone may eat and drink. Even add in tips for staff two vs one tend to tip more so then staff are happier too and stay and work harder. With the cleaner she still does the whole room one or two people she isn’t cheaper because it’s one person.

They have worked out it costs them more in lost side sales to have a one person per room than 2 so they pay a supplement to match the possible spending/minimum needed for the hotel so survive.

It might not look fair but it’s business and it’s about balancing their books. They could just say no single bookings at all but then people would moan too.

If it's cheaper to book a double, book a double and add an imaginary person/family members name onto the booking.

Can’t do that with packages, sadly, so I just book somewhere that wants my money!

Yes, the banding system and also huge discrepancies by area really need sorting out. The whole thing needs a huge overhaul really, to make it fair.

PPs talk of downsizing if you're single - well where I live, pretty much everything is band A. It's not posssible to downsize and pay less! Plus however you look at it, a couple will pay less per person even in a one-bed flat. Bearing in mind a single person is also having to pay much more in rent and so on, it IS unfair.

As for encouraging people to have children. Great. Society collectively contributes towards the next generation. But doesn't explain why a childless couple (or with adult children) should pay less per head than a single person. Also anyone who thinks it's a "lifestyle choice" to be single, or even in many cases to not have children, needs to give their head a wobble and have some empathy for those who would have a loved a family but didn't get the chance. As for saying "get a lodger or live in an HMO", perhaps they should actually stop and think about whether they'd be happy in a house shared with strangers, or who they know that they'd be happy to live with if they were single.

Also the talk of how much of council tax goes on social care matters just as much when considering couples/larger households, as when considering single people. Again, if we're collectively funding social care, why should those in couples pay less per adult?

People always talk of poll tax in these discussions, and how it wasn't fair that each adult in a multi generational household had to pay the same rate as the lord of the manor paid. (Not more - the same per adult.) So your family with say four adults kicks up a fuss. But they don't consider the family next door with only two adults and three DC to look after, or the regretfully childless and single lady in the tiniest property at the end of the street, who's already in poverty just by having to pay the rent alone. It is not fair that these people should pay more per adult.

I get the broad idea that people with more should pay more, but single people generally don't have more, precisely because they're already shelling out on everything else alone. If the property bandings were sorted out and actually fair/logical, the lower bandings at least should have a single person discount of 50%. Because they are already in a small property, not wealthy singletons in large houses. Although two wealthy people coupled up in a large house should really pay more than one wealthy person anyhow!

There's so much wrong with council tax that personally I'd scrap it and increase income tax to make up the difference.

It's the local councils that set your council tax. It is dependant on their spending. If you have a tonne of people who don't pay, and a lot that need support, and increasing costs, then your council tax will go up.

Your income tax is set by central government.

If your property is totally empty (e.g. in between tenants, sold but awaiting exchange of contracts), you pay 100%. So if the council tax is 50% property, 50% people, why do you have to pay 100% of the people charge? There’s no one there using any services at all! Unless you’ve been sent to prison, in which case you don’t have to pay any council tax on it all. How is that fair?

@BlackCountryWench2

It's not "fair", in that sense. It was introduced as a policy specifically to discourage people from leaving properties empty.

I think it varies by council, here there is no grace period but some places allow some time before council tax has to be paid on an empty property. I think there should be a grace period eg. where someone is moving home and their rental contracts overlap.

I totally agree about councils should grant a grace period, unfortunately my council doesn’t and I was slapped with an immediate 100% council tax charge on a property on which I was desperate to get the sale through. Having to pay the mortgage and standing charges on an empty property bringing in zero income was tough and the council charges on top pushed me into the red. Way to go, council 🖕

We had a tenant leave a place in a horrific state. Did a lot ourselves but had to get contractors in as well. Here we get 6 months grace after that it's full rates. So while with the estate agent we paid rates on an empty property.

My friend works for the council investigating abandoned properties, sometimes because someone has died without making a will it is a slow slog. A semi near us has been empty for five years slowly decaying. The neighbours have been trying to get it sorted because of water damage, rats, etc

Re poll tax. I’ve said this when this has come up before. The poll tax split society right down the middle between property owners and renters. The haves and have nots. This was before the buy to let boom when rented property was either council or a rubbish private property often a shared house (which I lived in for years)/Hmo.

before the poll tax, rates were always included in your rent. After the poll tax they weren’t. So the people who were the poorest in society (not property owners) suddenly had to pay another significant bill on top of their rent. And benefits weren’t as generous as they are now. Of course landlords didn’t reduce the rent to even it out given that they were no longer paying rates. The rent stayed the same. People just couldn’t pay it. It wasn’t a small bill and wages weren’t enough to cover it. So they moved regularly to avoid it (no stable home), took themselves off the electoral roll so basically became disenfranchised as well.

so the wealthy (property owners/landlords) were either not affected or were better off and the poor/less well off (renters) were universally significantly worse off, disenfranchised and criminalised through non payment.

collection rates went down as others have pointed out people who own very little can just move around.

Presumably your house/flat has a higher value than the married couple's and your neighbour has a larger family. It's the house that attracts the tax, not you.

What???

Do you not realise that the above inflation (way above) increases we had in the 2010s and beyond were all down to central Govt slashing council support, CT makes up a "small" part of council funding (approx 22%)

95% of councils put up CT by 5% or more, its got jack to do with who pays or not etc as you suggest, all that causes is even less in council services and less Police presence.

Who knew Income Tax was set by Central Govt lol!

Ah ok so you just mean council tax. It’s primarily supposed to be a tax based on property though and they put in an adjustment to give a discount to people living alone. You could equally argue that you have 100% of a house and pay 75% of a property based fee and the couple next door own 50% of one each and pay 100% of the fee for their 50%. It’s really a matter of perspective.
Also it’s clearly not the money that goes out of your wage before you are taxed (which is income tax/NI). It’s effectively a bill you pay out of your net wage and there are ways you could reduce it (moving house, choosing to let out a room in a shared house etc). You might not want to do any of them, which is fair enough but you could. In the end there is a massive limit to what you can do about your bills in a similar sense. Standing charges for utilities won’t change because you are living alone or the cost of heating your home to 18/19/20 or whatever temp you fee is necessary to be be comfortable or the cost of high speed internet or a tv subscription or the cost of getting a room decorated or buying a new piece of furniture or indeed to buy/rent the same house. It’s definitely more expensive to have the same property alone than to share it but I don’t really see why council tax specifically would be the one that makes a big difference when it’s the one there actually is a single person discount for.