Council tax bill - is this wild or are yours insanely high too?

[Notmycircusnotmyotter]

My local council took £232 in direct debit today for council tax. I'll be honest, I don't budget to the pound, so was shocked when I saw it and assumed they had wrongly taken off my single person discount. But nope. £232 is what 75% of the council tax charge is for my 3 bed terrace.

WTAF. This feels insanely high.

please don't tell me all about bankrupt councils and adult social care. I've heard it. I know.

My point is how are ordinary people paying these sorts of bills? I'm a single parent of two on a decent wage and it stings.

I don’t think that they should be allowed to raise council tax by more that the average wage increase (which I believe was around 3%). It’s very unfair that people are expected to pay a higher and higher proportion of their wages on council tax every year.

Thanks for that list my area and my home town hundreds of miles away are on the high list. But also to note I also pay a parish council charge so higher than the list states, whereas family in hometown don’t have that additional cost at least.

Sometimes they are wrongly assessed when built. A house we rented once I got the council tax lowered when I moved in. Didn’t save me much sadly but my LL got a big amount back. Years later I saw the original plan for the housing estate and the plot number of the house we rented was marked as a 4 bed detached double garage…..when built it was a 3 bed with parking space.

i missed your reply

same. Well one house is a D. Rest are C

yet all the same

I lived on a private close once where we had our own street lighting, repairs, cleaners etc for which we paid a hefty service charge. Council didn't give us any council tax discount though.

Send them to Essex please

Yup, it's been going up a lot the past few years, like everything. I remember a time counting up all the bills and they were affordable but now outgoings are almost double. Pre and post covid.

They won’t because there is not a CT discount for these things like there’s a discount for, for example, being a student or having had to move somewhere else to receive care.

Your property banding determined by the VOA which you can challenge by making an appeal to the VOA if you think that your property should not have been band G due to these circumstance for eg.

Jesus.

How can you be in band e in a 3 bed terrace

where I am band c in a 3 bed semi

Depends where you live. I'm Band F in a 2 bedroom flat.

Gosh, I was moaning about mine going up to £164! Feel quite lucky now tbh, looking at some of these amounts. 3 bed ex LA semi in the East Midlands.

This and the other big cost to councils is SEND costs which have risen exponentially. All the parents insisting that we need more special schools, transport to school in taxis, more children should get EHCP's, more 1:1 TA's in school, all well and good but the money has to come from somewhere and council tax is one of the places.
We have an ageing population and also a rapidly increasing proportion of our young people are too disabled to work at all. The care and support burden is incredibly high now.

Wow

I know it’s done on prices as well from years ago

but I thought rough guide was

a studio flat
b 1 /2 bedroom flat
c 2/3 bed house
d 4 bed house

what would you live in in an a or b @PhaedraTwo in your area ?

I own a rental flat in a traditional Victorian tenement of 16 flats which is one bedroom with an internal kitchen and a shared back green and is Band B. I've no idea what Band A might be. That flat is a nice enough flat but nowhere near as good a neighbourhood as the Band F flat. The Band F flat is a Grade B Listed Building in a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Generally I'd be very surprised if any 2 bedroom flats in my city were less than E-many will be higher.

To clarify, generally I'd be very surprised if there many 2 bedroom flats in my city, outwith the Social Housing sector, which are less than Band E-many will be higher.

I've had a look at the list. No wonder it stings. I've moved from number 1 cheapest (Wandsworth) to 223rd (Epsom). Council tax used to be around £90 pcm for my flat. Nearly £250 now here.

👏👏👏

But they pay tax too which is the point. We’re all public service workers.

Wow .I'm next door to you in Spelthorne and band E is £309 a month for a 3 bed semi. After the Surrey shuffle, it will be interesting to see how council tax is affected once we're in the same ward.

While I understand why the rates are different in different areas, it does seem unfair. It's not like everyone can just up and move to a cheaper CT area. Because clearly that doesn't correlate at all with cheaper areas to live in general.

I think it's becoming ridiculous when for some people its getting close to £400 a month. I certainly couldn't afford that, not without scrimping elsewhere and my wage is decent enough.

It's all just take, take, take from us. So depressing.

Birmingham City Council for every £20 pay nearly 25% of it towards their pensions.

Ours is £255 now paid over 12 months. Everything going up, nothing coming down. Wages definitely not keeping up.

For the 2024–25 financial year, approximately £4.80 to £5.34 out of every £20 in Birmingham's council tax goes toward staff pension contributions. 1, 2, 3]
Breakdown of Spending

• Proportion: Recent data shows that nearly one-quarter (roughly 24% to 26.7%) of all council tax raised is used for employer contributions to the Local Government Pension Scheme (LGPS).

Ours is £400 a month

Housing benefits are a biggie out of it.