@ViewAhead I'm glad you said 'almost'. The most incompetent Chancellor in history (and that's come claim following the Liz Truss weeks) deserves no sympathy from anybody. She is destroying this country. I thought Kemi Badenoch's response and utter demolition of her was brilliant.
I gather that someone somewhere has finally suggested that the issue of Council Tax should be looked into............. but apparently only referring to property valuation - 30 + years out of date - no mention of whether to take into account how many working people living in a single household tho. According to the authorities, each property has only 1 or 2 people living in it and using the various services available. How odd that so many new houses have to be built if the population is so small
TBH she's been leaking it and retracting it for weeks now, I assume someone just thought lets play you at your own game, before she changed it again.
The someone would have been the Chancellor; it is a partial revaluation of more expensive properties bands F, G and H. At least it's a start. Currently a single person in a property gets a 25% discount. Not many households have more than two incomes coming into the household and those that do it's often because adult children cannot afford to live by themselves or with a partner. I'm not sure 70 million is a small population, there is a severe lack of affordable housing and overall the housing stock is old and deteriorating.
I don't really understand why valuations being out of date is an issue. Surely it's only house size that matters, and hence the number of potential service users. So a studio flat should always be Band A, whether it's in Birkenhead or Chelsea. Of course the respective councils can charge a Band A at whatever rate they like but it will always be the lowest in their area. The fairest option is of course the Poll Tax but we all know what happened to that. However the fact that individual households are so small does contribute to the housing shortage. I'm a culprit myself taking up a whole 3-bedroom house that could have a family in it.
Bring back the poll tax, it is the fairest. The size of your house should have no bearing on council tax they only used that because of the old rates system.
If it's a charge for services, then the number of people who could potentially inhabit your house counts. Of course poll tax is fairer but the public won't accept that. So size of house (roughly equating to number of people in it, and if you live in a big house all by yourself that's your own fault) is the closest approximation. And presumably that's why house size drove rateable value too.
Maybe so, but that sounds like that very old joke about getting charged to use certain services at a hotel whether you used them or not. What is the potential of a HMO. I wonder what the council tax for one of those is.
A lot of people argue things like they don't have kids, so why should they pay for schools? But having young people well educated benefits us all - plus we don't want them hanging around on the streets all day!
A lot of HMO residents are on housing benefit; I seem to recall housing benefit recipients don't pay council tax.
I think that is a bit different personally, to charge you on the potential amount of people that could live in your house instead of how many do is taking things a bit far IMO.
But they cram people into those but most are just converted ordinary houses, so I assume the council tax is lower than other places with less people living in them.
But they already do that. I live alone and only get a 25% discount on my council tax. It has to be done that way, because a council needs to make a certain amount of money from a given area of houses. It still costs them as much to light and maintain the street and nearly as much to collect the rubbish (maybe slightly less volume but same number of houses to take the lorry around) if you have 1 person per house as it does if you have 5.
The idea of charging on the number of adults in a household was proposed by the Conservative government some years ago (Community Charge) and they were accused by Labour of trying to introduce a Poll Tax. Of course it would only affect working people, not those that Labour are currently handing thousands of pounds to after taking it from working people.
