Council tax is a c**t

[Upholstery]

What kind of a tax doesn't take account of how much money you have? It's all just a bloody con.

I’m so glad you clarified that the Locke you were talking about wasn’t the one from Lost, and that by labour you meant work. We’d all have been scrabbling around with our poor understanding otherwise.

Given most is spent on social care, wouldn’t this just mean that the higher earners would be even more inclined to move to more affluent areas? (Or have I completely misunderstood how it would be distributed)

Before single person discount, etc my band a flat in the south west is £1.5k per year

What utter rubbish. Where on earth did you get that 98.9% figure from? Are you honestly trying to say that only 1.1% of your tax goes on bin collections, waste disposal, street cleaning, planning services, registration, fire and police commissioners, etc, etc? ALL of the rest is spent on services you can’t access. Bollocks.

I think it’s the actual bandings that cause the most issues and can seem unfair based on values and neighbours and different parts of the country when compared. I think the fairest way to do it would be on actual square footage of the residence.

I had exactly this same issue. A small 2 bed flat (built in 2000s), I was band C. I then moved to a house worth 100k more and was band B.

I find council tax massively unfair. I lived alone and only got 25% off the bill but next door to me are 4 adults all paying less per person.

Yeah apart from Councils don't set bandings, the Valuation Office Agency do and at most would put on an improvement notice, the band may then change if you sold it.
You can also challenge any VOA re-banding.

Renters can also challenge bandings too, not just owner occupiers.

Seems this thread is bringing out the MN imagination.

If it's similar to where I live then one town provides the money and the next one gets the facilities ( normally for free as PP said)

Often you have to live in a certain postcode to be eligible. So we are good enough to pay for it but not eligible o attend thee things

Why are people moaning about building granny annexes and having to then pay more council tax? A granny annex tends to mean there'll be another person living at the property and using more services. Surely that's fair that the council tax goes up.

Never thought I’d see the day when the poll tax actually looked like a good option but here we are!

I thought about this other day, but the big hole in the argument to pay for what you discard is that people would flytrap. People are awful.

YANBU but you wouldn't want anyone knowing how much money you have, to be honest. It's none of anyone's business, especially not the council's.

As an interesting comparison, we have two houses in Italy with a combined space of about 200 SQ meters, with three acres of land, and we pay €200 a year in property tax. Other taxes are higher though.

Do you not drive on any roads, walk on pavements, use schools, ever need or know people that need adult or children care services, have your bins collected, make any changes to use house cans use planning, make use of any public realm in your town. ..

What do you get for that €200?

You don’t get it though, it’s not based on the size of your home. My small 2 bed flat cost more in council tax than my larger 2 bed home, despite it also being worth 100k more. I lived next door to a couple who had an adult child and their partner living with them. Why should I pay more for local services than them? It’s just a hugely massively unfair tax that governments are always too terrified to touch.

IMO they should bring back the window tax. Tax the houses according to how many windows they have.

Most council tax is spent on care of the eldery, not children.

It’s a time bomb because our population is ageing faster than ever before - net ageing is over 205,000 new over 65s per year.

Thatcher did touch it and it cost her the keys to number 10. I could ask why we (a couple) pay more for local services than the family down the street with three kids in school. Obviously I don’t ask that because I understand the concept of collective responsibility for society. MN is full of Thatcher’s children.

Yes I have a 2 bed grr flat ( bottom half of house type) is band C. The 3 bed houses in my road are also band c

The fact that there is little agreement on what the problem is with the current system nor what would be a better or fairer solution pretty much explains why no one is rushing to fix it.

The government needs to be able to collect taxes easily. Generally using the systems they have. People taxes and wealth taxes are difficult to collect. In the case of the former the solution was to link it to voting rights, hence Poll Tax. Which was an ideological issue for many people who refused to pay on principle and rioted over it.

As to establishing wealth, many really rich people don’t hold a lot of personal wealth and have armies of lawyers and accountants to hide it for them. There aren’t that many of them and there aren’t even that many fairly rich people. Which is why you will end up with a property tax not unlike one you have at the moment and the burden will fall on the so called better off. The line for defining better off is laughably low for income tax and it will be for a property tax or a person.

The other issue with a local tax is that economically active or wealthy areas have low spending and high revenue. This leads into the problem of contribution versus benefit. A good system would be built on near universal benefit and universal contribution. When it isn’t people become disgruntled and divided.

We have terrible public services and a lot of people who don’t contribute whilst the majority of tax burden falls on a group of people described as “better off”. Which just means easy to collect taxes from. I guarantee you that the billionaires of Westminster won’t be contributing more because they are impossible to tax on a local basis.

There'd be riots again if they tried

So be it. Let the chips fall where they may. People can only be pushed so far.

But if you can build a granny annexe to house another person, it seems completely fair to pay an extra £100 a month tax.

It's not about owning the asset, it's the services you access in the community.