I've been watching the news and it looks like Sunak is going to allow councils to increase Council Tax.

[caringcarer]

I just can't believe Council Tax is to rise really high now on top of all the other bill increases. Council Tax is already so expensive. I could cry. Do you think it will be from next April or straight away after budget? At least with utilities the more you use the more you pay so you can cut it back if you want to but with Council Tax you can't.

No that isn't true. About 23% of council funding comes from central government, the rest is raised locally or comes out of reserves, and a proportion of the business rates they must send back to central government www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/explainers/local-government-funding-england

Perhaps you haven't noticed how many councils are on or over the brink of bankruptcy?

As somebody else has commented, some 60%+ is spent on social care alone (in my council it is 68% this year). Council tax isn't a buffet menu - no more than income tax or VAT - you don't get to opt out by "cutting back". Personally I don't use the armed services and don't want to, but nobody is giving me my income tax back. I haven't used schools in the UK for 42 years - nobody is giving me a refund on that either.

We all have bills to pay. We could all cry over that. It isn't just the OP, but it doesn't mean we get to bash the local council for putting up the central government mandated local taxation to pay for the things that we as a society use. FWIIW, as a council employee, my "payrise" this year and last year both resulted in a reduction of my take home pay, and my pay today is worth 25% less than my pay in 2010. At the same time we are doing three times more work with what is now approaching half the staff we had back then. That makes me cry too. Then council staff get bashed for being "well off" (we aren't), lazy, negligent etc etc. So forgive me if I am fed up to the back teeth of being told that everyone elses ability to pay their bills is more important than the ability of me and my collegaues to pay theirs and then being blamed for not having the resources to meet everyobodys demands day after day after day.

If I were not a few months from retirement I'd be out of public service like a shot (and actually could be - my skills are in demand in the private sector, but I have a social conscience and thought I should use them to help people). I used to love working with and for people - I specialise in supporting the most deprived, disadvantaged and vulnerable communities. But it just isn't worth it any more. We are routinely abused, criticised and bashed because it seems that it is our "overpaid" fault that there are no services left. Anyone who enters public service these days needs their head testing.

It baffles me how many people don't know where their council tax money goes.

It is collected by the local authority and amongst many other things funds:
Adult Social Care
Childrens Services
Police and Crime Commissioner
Fire and rescue services
Registrars for births deaths and marriages
Food hygiene inspection of everywhere that sells food and drink
Maintenance of cemeteries and crematoria
Maintenance of parks and open spaces
Collecting the bins.
etc
etc...

Believe me...Council Tax does not pay for "lazy inept staff who sit on their arses drinking tea all day long whilst ignoring the phone calls".

My Council tax breakdown is that less than a fiver a week goes to my Borough Council for all the stuff they do.

The rest goes of to the county council, parish council, fire and rescue, pcc.

My local Facebook page is full of posts complaining about council services and 'when are they going to do something about x?' and 'the council should do something about y'. But if they want these things doing, they need to be paid for. You can't complain about council tax rising less than inflation and at the same time complain that the council can't afford to trim the hedge along your footpath or repair the pothole in your road the as soon as you want.

Council tax goes up every year to cover rising costs, so this year is no different from any other. The fact that is likely to go up by less than inflation is relatively good news for our budgets (because it could be far worse) but bad news for our local services.

Our council is giving a Chromebook to every Ukrainian who completes a CV updating course. And £300 towards utilities. Which hosts don't get.

We can certainly complain about the sheer amount of money wasted on half baked repairs to potholes where the tarmac falls out again within days of "repair", or the money wasted on "initiatives" that benefit no one, or, like in our village, quarter of a million spent on the tiny village library for mood led lighting and an outdoor deck! Or spending millions to build an outdoor and indoor swimming pool, only to close it a decade later because they hadn't bothered to maintain it and it needed too much money spent on it to make up for a decade of neglect. Or spending millions converting a disused railway station concourse into an arts venue when it would have been cheaper to renovate an existing arts venue nearby which they demolished, the land still being empty, overgrown and neglected. Funny how they manage to find money for things that enable the council leaders to get publicity in the local media, but they never have money for basic maintenance.

I resent council tax so much.
It's my biggest bill apart from housing. It's so much
Just me to pay it

Very true

No they aren't. The government is funding that. The address for complaints is c/o Rishi Sunak.

I couldn't work out the numbers earlier, they literally dont stack up, social care is absolutely, biblically, truly, fucked. I can't see how a mandatory 5% will cut it, people will start defaulting - and that's the last thing councils want.

Councils pay for social care, but I don't think people understand just the unreal scale of it, just how low the pay is, how tough it is to recruit and retain staff (not bloody easy with tesco round the corner and christmas shifts calling). The covid measures are still in place for social care, and staff are bearing the cost when they fall ill.

Then we have support for those with profound and multiple disabilities, and children's services - the children's homes have been hoovered up by private equity the same as elder care, and councils have had to pay through the nose.

But people don't see that, they see potholes and gullies, which is just infrastructure not made for the intensity of traffic we have on the roads now.

And don't get me started on the bloody "money making" schemes, you think a solar farm would be a sure fire thing in the climate, but fuck me if we won't find a way of making a loss on it, do you know why? We have capital reserve, but our business is public service! We know sod all about profit making!

We have flogged every scrap of land without a covenant on it, the buildings we have left are toxic bombshells which noone would touch with a bargepole, the leisure centres have been punted out on contracts, the town centres are decimated by the move to online.

The only thing we've got left are the flowerbeds, and that's down to the volunteers!

dreading it we already pay 261 band E, no £150 refund for us,