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.

Mine is 160 with the single person discount:( bills do not work well for single income households.

It does not take a mathematical genius to see that the single person discount should be 50% to be fair, The entire rotten system is built around the assumption of a two‑adult household. Families receive more state support. Single, childfree adults pay proportionally more and use proportionately less servces, When this is pointed out, that single people are effectively subsidising families then they feel accused. They cant handle it. So they reach for a moral justification rather than a factual one.

The obtuse argument that "my children will pay your pension and wipe your bum falls down completely.

Having children is not a public service and a pension is not a reward for having cvhildren.

Your children are not going to personally "look after" me. This is not an argument. Its a deflection. There is no gaurantee that your children will ever find jobs or contribute to the community. They could grow up to be criminals, drug addicts or have "mebtal health" problems and put nothing into society. Children suck up huge resources and generate waste. They spread disease. But their parents pay nothig extra.

I blame the environmentalists, everything councils do now costs 2-3x as much and takes 2-5x as long because of all the environmental studies/mitigations they have to go nowadays.

One east anglian council has already spent 56m on a 4 mile road without a single inch of it being built so far because of some rare bats that someone managed to find on the route.

HS2 could have been up and running already if it wasn't for all the eco work that is forced on them.

I am all for the environment and eco stuff but there has to be a balance and at the moment far too much money is spent on the eco stuff but legally has to be done but would be better spent elsewhere.

Yep, closure of all those specialist schools to ‘save money’ really was a stupid, shortsighted idea

I’m now £178 for a 2 bed flat, single person’s discount, central Scotland. I’ve no problem paying for schools, social care, etc. But I do feel us single, childless, lot lose out all ways. (I was sadly unable to have kids.) We now pay extra for garden & food recycling, FFS! It’s not encouraging anyone,
The roads are in a terrible state, and our town centre is about to undergo 9 weeks of traffic disruption- at a cost of £1.5 million, apparently ) which everyone is complaining about. For example, it’s probably going to take me an extra 15 minutes to get to work.
Anyway, what I’m getting at, is there’s some heavy cash being spent on these big projects, but I do think single person households should get more of a discount. Not sure how we’re costing 75% of what a 4 person household is!! For example, my parents, in a 3 bed house, about 5 miles from me, are only paying £220 in total!!

In some areas nearly half of Council tax is spent on pensions for Local Authority staff.

In some areas, Orkney I think is one, the council pension scheme takes more than 100% of the council tax take. How they function is anybody's guess.

I did this and they said no. We live in an average 4 bed on a road with similar houses who are all a G band - if they lower our band they’ll have to do the whole road. It was built in 1995 and council tax was based on the 1991 value. We paid less than the 1991 value when we bought it in 2001 - I argued that too! Still said no!

Mine is a 3 bed semi detached and I pay 135 a month! I thought that was enough !

I’m paying £178 for a 3 bed mid terrace. That seems high to me as I have lost single person discount for my daughters gap year. That said I did a loft conversion 10 years ago so I guess the rate is still on the 2 bed rate until I move and they will reband.

Mine has also gone up loads. I have a small detached modern house but no front garden, no garage, a tiny kitchen (fridge freezer doesn’t even fit in it, it’s in a cupboard in the hallway) 3 beds and small back garden yet I’m band G. Most people don’t believe me when I say I’m band G. It’s a small house.

I’m £1885 per year which includes water and sewerage. Two bedroom sandstone cottage.

I'm also a single parent on a decent income OP. Others don't quite realise how hard it is on one income. The tax syatem etc should reflect household income not individual income. I also get zero CMS. What looks like a good wage is actually less than someone on benefits. It's shit!

We have an ageing population. Council tax isn't going to get any cheaper for the foreseeable future.
Council staff aren't on mega-bucks.

£350 here due to tax because we near a tourist place...it's shocking

Have you missed all the news over the last few years about the "cost of living crisis"?

My annual council tax bill is less than a fortnight’s worth of income tax.

Rather than just looking at the whole bill it may be worth considering what it pays for and which bits could be cut further? Should the spend on bins be cut, or should the disabled person down the street get less care, or should the pot holes not be filled, or should we ban random flags so the council don’t have to pay to take them down. It’s an honest question.
Who has looked on their council’s breakdown of costs.
NB no I don’t work for a council.

Because £300 a month is about 20% of my income, I don’t think I should be working 1 day in 5 to pay for other people to go into privately owned care homes making a profit for their owners, or paying for private schools or taxis for SEN kids when everyone seems to have SEN these days. I think the councils could run things themselves to provide these services more cheaply.

Exactly this! I pay £360 a month on a band F. Finding egregious examples of low banded equivalent or bigger homes is like shooting fish in a barrel. I almost wouldn’t mind the high cost if it were an equitable system but it is not.

I have no chance to appeal as my home home is one of 4 designs on a small 70s development. Mine is the smallest but they were all banded the same. I have worked out that, with inflation, band f would now be 650-800k. My house is not in that ballpark.

It’s galling isn’t it? You only have to scan RightMove to find example after example of houses in incorrect bands.

We are also paying for council vanity projects - I live in Edinburgh and they bought in trams at the costs of milllions - toook years longer than they said it would and was way over budget. And we had an excellent bus route that went that exact same way. I wouldn’t mind paying the exorbitant amount if it was going into social care, grants to small charities, fixing potholes….. but it’s like having a second mortgage meanwhile the infrastructure around us crumbles.

we are having councils being ripped of by operate companies sorting the adult social care, they are making millions out of our council tax. There are very few in house residential places.

Just as an aside. Don’t know about rUK but in Scotland our councils are hampered by historical Labour decisions regarding PFI and equal pay for women.

I think we have it good due to the fact that we pay a one off charge for unlimited water within our CT.

I couldn’t cope with a water metre. We just use what we want, when we want it.

If there were no private schools your council tax would be even higher. They subsidise the state sector despite the nonsense Labour comes out with. The VAT policy has made things much worse for the taxpayer who will now receive lower subsidies from the private school sector.

Talk about turkeys voting for Christmas.