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.

That's simply not true.

https://www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/article/quarter-of-council-tax-revenue-spent-on-unjustifiably-generous-staff-pensions-xrvlmj6hp

Do you live in a Labpur council area, OP? I do, which is why my Council Tax has been very high for the last 30+ years. The only service I use is having the bins emptied but, unfortunately, it's part of the principle of taxation that we have to pay for services we may personally not be using (schools, social care etc).

When did this happen? My neighbour challenged it when he moved in and his house was dropped to a C. So I filled out the form but was told in writing by the Scottish Assessors office that you can only do this within 6 months once the missives are completed on the property. Because I had been in my house for years, they would not even look at it. Let alone backdate anything.

Varies by borough.

Mine is now almost £400 for a three bed terrace.

Care assistants are not council employees (mostly paid by agencies), so they do not have access to a public sector pension scheme and you are likely not contributing to their pensions in any way (because many agencies class them as self-employed).

So do you want the people providing personal care to elderly people, who are already on NMW, to be paid less than minimum wage?

Or do you want elderly people with no assets (because those with assets self-fund) to be left to lie in their own faeces if their families can’t pay for their care?

Those are the two options if you want to cut funding to adult social care.

Yes from central govt not rates

Im public sector and for the number of people I manage, level of responsibility and budget I would earn twice what I do now in the private world. Trust me even with my pension, you are getting value for money. That said I hate council tax!

I'm a single, child-free pensioner too. Children's services accounts for around £350 of my £1,500 council tax.

I don't resent it. I want there to be enough well-educated adults to provide the essential services, inc health care, that I will inevitably need more of as I get more decrepit, and a well-educated workforce that will be able to pay enough tax to fund those services.

The only bit of my council tax that I really resent is the town council, who cost me over £200pa for providing a few bins and benches and maintaining a cemetery and a park, and run 2 buildings that can be hired for functions. They had the cheek to put their share of my bill up by a whopping 27%!

Bankrupt councils and social care......

But you already knew that. Add in all the adhd, spectrum, lack of parenting and schools are now underfunded. Roads are falling to bits. NHS costs rising due to an aging population and being replaced with people who would rather take benefits than contribute. Add in the illegal immigrants who we are subsidising etc etc etc etc

Someone needs to start pissing back in the bucket because middle earning britain cant support this much longer.

Gosh, I can’t believe how much all your council tax is. Mine is £147 per month, no discounts, Band F, nice part of London.

Yes, that’s a really mean take. I’m an older person and glad to say bitterness has not eaten at my soul. I could never resent help for needy children or animals.

I doubt either of you pre-date compulsory education or the founding of the NHS. So your education and healthcare would have been funded by rates, poll tax, NI, or another form of general taxation.

The point is you will have taken plenty out in the past and will more than likely take plenty out in the future. You were not contributing as a child and probably won’t contribute much as a pensioner. You can’t opt out for the middle years when you are not utilising services if you still want help to be there in the future.

General taxation. I'm sure my scholarship at school didn't cost the state much.

Besides the discussion is council tax which doesn't pay for schooling and nhs.

We moved in 2014, took a few months for the appeal to go through and assessor to come out so by the time it was accepted we were here about 8 months. Neighbours definitely got a backdated refund, they appeared at our door with flowers and!
A quick Google says the legislation allows for an appeal after 6 months if a 'relevant decision' has been made so perhaps our successful appeal allowed theirs to be considered I really don't know, just going off personal experience.

There seems to be such huge disparity in council bills. That is £1,764 a year. I’m in a lower band than you, miles away from London and my band is over £3,000 pa.

Rates were paid even by those who rented.

also im public sector. I work in HE. Shouldn’t we get paid then?

The pension is an incentive to keep employees working in the public sector. Take that away and people would go back into the private sector and there would be even bigger issues.

There are some incredibly dedicated, hard working individuals in the public sector. Working crazy hours for terrible pay with the promise that some day, their pension will be half decent.

It’s over 10 months so £1,470 per year. Crazy.

An even bigger gap 😩

I'm probably in the "scum" category, too. I've mostly worked in the public sector and in the "third sector", delivering contracts paid for out of public sector money.

And to add to grist to that particular mill, for the last 25 years of my working life, I was doing mostly or wholly welfare rights work, so I was helping people that that poster would probably regard as even scummier than me!

In 2016-17 councils and other bodies across England paid £7.4bn in pension contributions, although it's uncertain exactly how much of that was funded by council tax.
During that period, people in England paid £26bn in council tax, which accounted for 28% of total local government funding.
If 28% of local authority pension contributions that year came from council tax, then the cost would be about £2bn.
That amounts to 8p of every £1 of council tax paid in England.

Mine as well. When I first moved here the local Council froze the tax for a few years but since then it has gone up every year. Mine was £431 last year and will be more this year

@Notmycircusnotmyotter the first payment is always a bit higher as they work out the equal monthly payments. You can always ask to pay over 12 months instead of 10 months if that would help you

And for those moaning about the salaries, I used to work for the council, left in 2022 was on £22K/annum. Crap salary and equally crap pension

It's simply not fair to blame council salaries. Everybody deserves a decent salary and public sector salaries tend to be lower than those in the private sector.
Ageing populations are costly to support, whether we're talking about in-home services or residential care. And we all subsidise those who wriggle out of care home fees by bequeathing money early, for example - as we sometimes hear about on here.
We all feel the pinch from rising costs, whether it's fuel, labour, materials or food. Councils are not immune to that.

Depends on the council running costs - I pay more than the PP because I live in a less-wealthy borough of London, and other residents claim more and contribute less. From memory, I think the cheapest council tax is City of London because there are practically no residents (lots of business rate income though).

I do agree it should be more equal, but I don’t know how you would do that without penalising people in expensive areas. I live in a small 3 bedroom ex council house worth over £1m, because that’s just what houses cost around here. I’d be annoyed to pay more than somebody in a six bedroom mansion just because they live in Northumbria and houses are cheaper there, and obviously it would be wildly unfair on social housing tenants in a house like mine.

That’s a sad take. Does the resentment and spite show on your face?