Government announcing doubling council tax double for band G & H

[spookymelon666]

I know it’s not yet set in stone. We can’t afford it. There’s an assumption that these are high value houses. My house is worth no more than 300K 3 bedroom detached 125m2 with no front garden or driveway or garage and a tiny back garden and we are band G in Scotland. I’m so frustrated by the cost of living. We already can’t afford any holidays. AIBU that this isn’t fair?

Yep this is all preparing for the budget by Labour

“And then there's the family that have had a self-contained "garden building" erected, which they let through airbnb or similar. It seems to have a very high occupancy rate, there are people staying there most weekends and often for a night or two in the week. The house is still banded C, despite having what is effectively a studio flat in the garden.”

@LakieLady - presumably these people pay income tax on that let? We want people to be entrepreneurial and create more wealth by doing this kind of thing, not the opposite.
They might want some elderly to take in lodgers to assist them with their payments and help them rather than rely on state help?
Who knows what will happen or what goes through their minds. But the poor pensioner sitting in a huge house card is not going to play long term anymore. The young are just getting too poor and are refusing to have children and we need the economy to work for all, long term. Not just based on pitying people.

The most entrepreneurial of people may build in their garden and house the refugees that nobody wants to put up? Who knows what sort of stuff the Government can come up with. They can tax the air we breathe! Look at London taxes. We are taxed left right and centre and CCTV everywhere in case you have one wheel in a box junction. That is why our council taxes were lower! Or the shops pay through their noses. It is not all the rich London bastards not paying their way as some Labour MPs seem to think.

If it were from Labour themselves, we'd see these stories first in the Mirror etc but no, they always appear in the Express, Mail and Telegraph first.

None of the scare stories actually happen.

That’s a high band OP. Our house is worth £400k in the South West and we’re in band E.

A lot of people in the south are NOT rolling in it. They will have higher mortgage payments and are just about scraping by. If council tax doubles many will be in very dire straits.
Many older people who's properties have shot up in value over the years are not necessarily very wealthy, so they too will be struggling.
Maybe the government could think about spaffing away a bit less of our money to other countries, if they want to fill the black hole, which has doubled since they came to power

Fuck the government if they do this to people like me. I've only just paid them 28k of stamp duty to move into my band G property in the SE. We have a young family and a high mortgage. We are NOT the same as an older couple who bought their band G house for £1k in the 1990s and paid off their mortgage years ago.

Honestly this is just awful- there are a lot of houses which will fall into this which do not house rich people.
We are band F and we’re not even on mains gas or sewage and the roads are awful yet we pay a premium yet use far less of the services than people on lower bands or who do not pay at all.

yet again the government are punishing the middle

I am intrigued by the number of posters who seem to think Londoners should automatically be paying more tax.

They might be shocked to discover their terraced three bed in a similar area / exactly the same size, might cost 5-10x as much in London, meaning hugely higher house prices (and so mortgage and rent payments) to live in exactly the same kind and quality of accommodation. And then for this ‘privilege’ people seem keen they also pay far higher taxes…

another tax on London…

This is the problem they face.

They want to try and extract wealth (and specifically property wealth) from people who bought decades ago and have ridden the wave of growth and unearned gains from that…

.. but the collateral damage in doing that is younger adults who have bought at today’s high prices, haven’t benefited from the 15+ years of low interest rates, and are having to spend half their income on a really silly mortgage for an average looking property.

Given how distorted house prices are regionally I can’t see how using the same bands is realistic

is there another measure that would be fairer?

and cut the layers of government - they seem to spend a lot of time arguing amongst themselves

And that is why they just have to tax everyone a bit once dead, not once alive.

But also for a lot of people it is a home - not an investment. So telling an old couple sitting on a massive gain that they’re rich is meaningless if they have no intention of selling other will be IHT

and then there’s the potential to use that for care fees so it’s going in the pot that way potentially

property tax is emotive because it is invariably a home rather than an investment

If they tax London even more, there will literally be no families left and they already have this problem. And if everyone moves elsewhere then they complain about rich DFL pushing up house prices and sucking up services. That already happened somewhat during Covid.
As there is a big generational right in housing wealth I really fail to see how they can double the highest council tax bands without a terrible fall out. Especially for those who already paid stamp duty. Those people won’t be able to remortgage at all either, because they could fail affordability checks with a double tax rate.

You couldn't buy a house for 1k in the 90s. Maybe in the fifties. Also are you aware of what the interest rates were back in the 90s?

Well, quite.

Albeit I think the idea of a property tax is fine in principle - it’s the absolute numbers that are being thrown around now that are so ridiculous and I think triggering a lot of the anxiety.

£360 a month in council tax is a hefty monthly bill. Doubling this to £720 is just… ridiculous. Like a permanent second mortgage.

I have no idea where exactly the people
proposing this thinks that money might come from - it suggests a total disconnect in understanding people’s incomes and what the life of the super elite (joking) in… a band F or G house looks like (utterly ordinary…!). F or G doesn’t mean a mansion.

It’s not a new problem though - stamp duty rates are frankly laughable in London, six figures for what is a normal family home elsewhere.

At some point people need to be allowed to get on with and enjoy their lives, every moment of their being doesn’t need to be turned into a new taxation opportunity for the government.

I knew someone would quote me on that. I was being facetious, but the truth is that house prices were much more affordable back in the 90s.

Same! And there's no discount for that. Literally the only service we get is bin collection and an annual mauling of the hedgerows.

I bought my first house for £44k in 1992 when my salary was £4,600 and interest rates were 13%. How is that more affordable than an average house price of £270k, average salary of £35k and base rate at 4%?

The generational blame game is just another way to try and point the finger at someone else to bear the tax

Wasn’t this mooted as an alternative possibility for the property tax (I think it was mentioned that essentially a wealth tax would replace a council tax charge for band G and above)?

Where I am confused is that council taxes are levied by local govt/the council and the funds go into their pot, not central govt’s, so I’m struggling to work out how this would fill up the govt’s coffers unless they plan to follow it up by awarding less money to LAs in response to how much they raise from this, or plan to deprive them of funds on the basis of harvesting this money direct from property owners.

I may have misunderstood it - not least because it is all rumours and conjecture so there is no actual plan set out.

How did you manage to buy a house for £44k with £4,600 income?

Also - the average salary in 1992 was about £15k, and today is a little more than double that, while the average house price is several times greater.

If houses had grown in value at the same rate as salaries your first house would be worth closer to £100k now - not £275k.

Well I was young, I wouldn't have been on an average salary. I bought with DH who was fresh out ofthe Army on a similar salary. We saved pretty much everything we earned for 3 years beforehand. The only holiday we had was 3 days in Dover.

My very first entry level job in 1985 was a £6,000 salary. Were you working full time?