Households in England face above-inflation £2bn council tax raid
Bugger. I can’t afford £2bn.
Plus also, more seriously:
The NPP said a household living in a house in Hartlepool worth £150,000 was paying more than £200 a year more in council tax than someone in Westminster in a property worth £8m.
Move to Westminster?
/s
I mean, it would pay for itself in just under 40,000 years!
This is the best summary I could come up with:
In a deal to address the worsening financial crisis hitting town halls across the country, officials in Michael Gove’s levelling up department have told local authority bosses they expect the maximum possible 4.99% increase to be applied to council tax in April.
It comes as Sunak prepares to put cuts to income tax at the heart of the Tories’ re-election strategy, with a raft of measures expected to be announced in the spring budget, to be paid for by “difficult decisions” to limit spending on public services and welfare.
David Phillips, an economist at the Institute for Fiscal Studies, said it would hurt the poorest households most because council tax forms a larger share of their monthly outgoings than that of a wealthier family.
Last week Gove announced an injection of an extra £600m into local government funding in England to stave off the threat of a Commons rebellion by Tory MPs worried about cuts to services in their constituencies.
However, in details glossed over by the government, almost half of the £4.5bn boost is based on the assumption that every local authority in England applies the maximum allowable council tax rise.
The rises come amid growing calls for changes to council tax, which remains based on 1991 property valuations despite a vast increase in house prices over the past three decades.
The original article contains 909 words, the summary contains 222 words. Saved 76%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
