Council tax: How much is yours going up by?

Published

2 years ago

March 8, 2023

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Council tax is due to rise on 1 April for many people, another turn of the screw for those already struggling with the cost of living crisis.

People in Wales have seen their council tax rise significantly faster than those in England and Scotland over the past 12 years.

However it’s those in Rutland and Nottingham, in the East Midlands, who will have the highest fees when the 2023/24 rates come in on 1 April.

People living in Band D properties there will pay more than £2,400 a year, while those in similarly-priced properties in Westminster and Wandsworth will pay less than £900.

Despite having lower rates per band than those in Rutland and Nottingham, people in Surrey councils are likely to pay some the highest levels of council tax overall as there are more properties valued in the highest tax bands.

In Elmbridge, a Surrey borough home to many Chelsea footballers seeking proximity to their Cobham training ground, more than a quarter of homes are in Bands G and H, six times more than normal across Great Britain.

Just one in fifty properties are in the least expensive Bands A and B, compared with a national average of one in five.

As a result, people in Elmbridge are likely to pay more than £2,800 each in the year to April 2024, more than any other area.

At the other end of the scale, almost all the areas with the cheapest council tax after adjusting for house prices are in Scotland.

People in Shetland or the Western Isles will pay less than £1,200 on average, higher only than Wandsworth and lower than even Westminster, which retain their positions towards the bottom of the table despite high house prices there.

The cheapest areas outside of London or Scotland are Stoke-on-Trent, Sunderland and Wigan, where people are likely to pay just under £1,500 each.

What’s happening in the different nations?

Every council in Scotland has reduced council tax in real terms since 2011/12, the first year for which equivalent data is available across all three of England, Scotland and Wales.

In Wales, council tax has risen by at least 12% in every council area, even after adjusting for inflation.

Northern Ireland’s Department of Finance say that it is “impossible to make a straightforward comparison” to the other nations on council tax. The country has a system of domestic rates which is similar but different to council tax.

In Wales as a whole people are likely to be paying about a fifth more than they were twelve years ago even after adjusting for inflation, while people in Scotland will be paying about 8% less.

This year’s high Inflation is cited as one reason why rates have risen in Wales:

“Budget setting is extremely difficult this year due to high inflation and other cost drivers. While the settlement from Welsh Government was better than expected, it still leaves an enormous gap of around £300m to be bridged,” explained the Welsh Local Government Association.

But inflation has also been high across the rest of Great Britain.

The Scottish government froze council tax from 2007/08 to 2016/17, and blocked councils from raising rates by more than 3% in real terms from then until 2020-21.

“This has resulted in 30-40% lower Council Tax charges on average in Scotland compared with England and Wales”, said the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities.

There has never been such a cap in Wales, while in England, councils with social care duties can raise council tax by 5% and others can put it up by 3%.

If a local authority wants to increase council tax by more than 5%, residents must vote for it in a referendum. As yet, perhaps unsurprisingly, none have been passed.

Croydon, Slough, and Thurrock, however, have been granted special permission from the government this year to raise their council tax above this cap because of huge gaps in their finances.

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Why do some councils set higher council tax than others?

You get a different answer depending on who you ask.

Councils that have managed to keep council tax low, like Wandsworth, Hillingdon and Hammersmith & Fulham laid credit to prudent and responsible financial management from those responsible over several years.

Places like Rutland, Dorset and Wakefield, which have all raised council tax by some of the highest amounts in England, have called for fairer funding for councils, however.

They say that many councils which charge lower council tax get more money given to them by central government grants, despite often having less demand for expensive services like adult social care.

Are the explanations fair?

The Local Government Association told Sky News that one fund that the English government distributes to councils – the Revenue Support Grant – meant that “essentially a lot of the calculation of how much council tax people pay is set centrally,” supporting claims by councils that higher taxes are somewhat out of their control.

The more grant money a council receives the more likely it is to have lower council tax.

Westminster receives more than £170 per person from the Revenue Support Grant, more than the 157 bottom councils put together – each of which get less than £2 per person.

Rural areas are worst affected. Five of the ten areas that receive the most per person from the Revenue Support Grant are in London and all the others are cities.

Adding to add to that issue, councils with the most over-65s – also more likely to be rural areas – have higher council tax rates than those with fewer.

Councillor Lucy Stevenson, leader of Rutland Council, told Sky News that “part of the first job is actually telling our rural story so that we get people to look beyond what they see is affluence, and actually inside the county.”

“When we were looking at levelling up, some of the residents said ‘Are you sure we deserve that money?’ I said ‘absolutely. Have you looked at our data?’

“The second job is to come up with solutions. There is a wider issue for local government. Most councils are looking at deficit budgets or cutting services. The whole of local government needs serious consideration.

“It is the workhorse of the country for everybody’s day to day lives.”

The Data and Forensics team is a multi-skilled unit dedicated to providing transparent journalism from Sky News. We gather, analyse and visualise data to tell data-driven stories. We combine traditional reporting skills with advanced analysis of satellite images, social media and other open source information. Through multimedia storytelling we aim to better explain the world while also showing how our journalism is done.

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UK

UK economy grows by 0.1% between July and September – slower than expected

Published

3 hours ago

November 15, 2024

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UK economy grows by 0.1% between July and September - slower than expected

The UK economy grew by 0.1% between July and September, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

However, despite the small positive GDP growth recorded in the third quarter, the economy shrank by 0.1% in September, dragging down overall growth for the quarter.

The growth was also slower than what had been expected by experts and a drop from the 0.5% growth between April and June, the ONS said.

Economists polled by Reuters and the Bank of England had forecast an expansion of 0.2%, slowing from the rapid growth seen over the first half of 2024 when the economy was rebounding from last year’s shallow recession.

And the metric that Labour has said it is most focused on – the GDP per capita, or the economic output divided by the number of people in the country – also fell by 0.1%.

Reacting to the figures, Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves said: “Improving economic growth is at the heart of everything I am seeking to achieve, which is why I am not satisfied with these numbers.

“At my budget, I took the difficult choices to fix the foundations and stabilise our public finances.

“Now we are going to deliver growth through investment and reform to create more jobs and more money in people’s pockets, get the NHS back on its feet, rebuild Britain and secure our borders in a decade of national renewal,” Ms Reeves added.

The sluggish services sector – which makes up the bulk of the British economy – was a particular drag on growth over the past three months. It expanded by 0.1%, cancelling out the 0.8% growth in the construction sector.

The UK’s GDP for the most recent quarter is lower than the 0.7% growth in the US and 0.4% in the Eurozone.

The figures have pushed the UK towards the bottom of the G7 growth table for the third quarter of the year.

It was expected to meet the same 0.2% growth figures reported in Germany and Japan – but fell below that after a slow September.

The pound remained stable following the news, hovering around $1.267. The FTSE 100, meanwhile, opened the day down by 0.4%.

The Bank of England last week predicted that Ms Reeves’s first budget as chancellor will increase inflation by up to half a percentage point over the next two years, contributing to a slower decline in interest rates than previously thought.

Announcing a widely anticipated 0.25 percentage point cut in the base rate to 4.75%, the Bank’s Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) forecast that inflation will return “sustainably” to its target of 2% in the first half of 2027, a year later than at its last meeting.

The Bank’s quarterly report found Ms Reeves’s £70bn package of tax and borrowing measures will place upward pressure on prices, as well as delivering a three-quarter point increase to GDP next year.

UK

Meeting the deeply radical anti-tax group that is ‘growing in popularity’

Published

3 hours ago

November 15, 2024

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Meeting the deeply radical anti-tax group that is 'growing in popularity'

“If you are a member of something, it means you’ve accepted membership. Anything with ‘ship’ on the end, it’s giving you a clue: it’s telling you that’s maritime law. That means you’ve entered into a contract.”

This isn’t your standard legal argument and it is becoming clear that I am dealing with an unusual way of looking at the world.

I’m in the library of a hotel in Leicestershire, a wood-panelled room with warm lighting, and Pete Stone, better known as Sovereign Pete, is explaining how “the system” works. Mr Stone is in his mid-50, bald with a goatee beard and wearing, as he always does for public appearances, a black T-shirt and black jeans.

With us are six other people, mainly dressed in neat jumpers. They’re members of the Sovereign Project (SP), an organisation Mr Stone founded in 2020, which, he says, now has more than 20,000 paying members.

As arcane as this may sound, it represents a worldview that is becoming more influential – and causing problems for authorities. Loosely, they’re defined as “sovereign citizens” or “freemen on the land”.

Their fundamental point is that nobody is required to obey laws they have not specifically consented to – especially when it comes to tax. They have hundreds of thousands of followers in the UK across platforms including YouTube, Facebook and Telegram.

Increasingly, they are coming into conflict with governments and the law. Sovereign citizens have ended up in the High Court in recent months, challenging the legalities of tax bills and losing on both occasions.

In October, four people were sentenced to prison for the attempted kidnapping of an Essex coroner, who they saw as acting unlawfully. The self-appointed “sheriffs” attempted to force entry to the court, one of them demanding: “You guys have been practising fraud!”

The Sovereign Project is not connected to any of those cases, nor does it promote any sort of political action, let alone violence.

Instead, they are focused on issues like questioning the obligation to pay taxes, as Mr Stone explains, referencing the feudal system that operated in the Middle Ages.

“Do you know about the feudal system when people were slaves and were forced to pay tax?” he asks.

“Now, unless the feudal system still operates today, and we still have serfs and slaves, then the only way that you can pay taxes is to have a contract, you have to agree to it and consent to it.”

Another member, Karl Deans, a 43-year-old property developer who runs the SP’s social media, says: “We’re not here to dodge tax.”

Local government tends to be a target beyond just demands for tax. Mr Stone speaks of “council employee crimes”.

I ask whether, considering the attempted kidnapping in Essex, there is a danger that people will listen to these accusations of crimes by councils and act on them.

“Well that’s proved,” Mr Stone says. “We only deal with facts.”

Evidence suggests this approach is becoming an issue for councils across the UK, as people search online for ways to avoid paying tax.

Sky News analysis shows that out of 374 council websites covering Great Britain, at least 172 (46%) have pages responding to sovereign citizen arguments around avoiding paying council tax. They point out that liability for council tax is not dependent on consent, or a contract, and instead relies on the Local Government Finance Act 1992, voted on by Parliament.

But the Sovereign Project’s worldview extends beyond council tax. It is deeply anti-establishment, at times conspiratorial. Stone suggests the summer riots may have been organised by the government.

“The sovereign fraternity operates above all of this,” he says. “We look down at the world like a chessboard. We see what’s going on.”

He explains that, really, the UK government isn’t actually in control: there is a shadow government above them.

“These are the people who control government,” he explains.

“A lot of people say this could be the crown council of 13, this could be a series of Italian families.”

Professor Christine Sarteschi, an expert in sovereign citizens at Chatham University, Pittsburgh, says she’s worried about the threat sovereign citizens may pose to the rule of law, especially in the US where guns are readily available.

“The movement is growing and that’s evidenced by seeing it in different countries and hearing about different cases. The concern is that they will become emboldened and commit acts of violence,” she says.

“Because sovereigns truly believe in their ideas and if they feel very aggrieved by, you know, the government or whomever they think is oppressing them or controlling them… they can become emotionally involved.

“That emotional involvement sometimes leads to violence in some cases, or the belief that they have the power to attempt to overthrow a government in some capacity.”

Much of this seems to be based on an underlying and familiar frustration at the state of this country and of the world.

Mr Stone echoes some of the characteristic arguments also made by the right, that there is “two-tier policing”, that refugees arriving in the UK are “young men of fighting age”, that the government is using “forced immigration to destroy the country”.

Another SP member, retired investment banker David Hopgood, 61, says: “I firmly believe it is the true Englishman – and woman – of this country – that has the power to unlock this madness that’s happening in the West.

“We’ve got the Magna Carta – all these checks and balances. We just need to pack up, go down to Parliament and say: It’s time to dismiss you. You’re not fit for purpose.”

The members of the Sovereign Project are unfailingly patient and polite in explaining their understanding of the world.

But there is no doubt they hold a deeply radical view, one that is apparently growing in popularity.

UK

Wes Streeting ‘crossed the line’ by opposing assisted dying in public, says Labour peer Harriet Harman

Published

3 hours ago

November 15, 2024

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Wes Streeting 'crossed the line' by opposing assisted dying in public, says Labour peer Harriet Harman

Wes Streeting “crossed the line” by opposing assisted dying in public and the argument shouldn’t “come down to resources”, a Labour peer has said.

Speaking on Sky News’ Electoral Dysfunction podcast, Baroness Harriet Harman criticised the health secretary for revealing how he is going to vote on the matter when it comes before parliament later this month.

MPs are being given a free vote, meaning they can side with their conscience and not party lines, so the government is supposed to be staying neutral.

But Mr Streeting has made clear he will vote against legalising assisted dying, citing concerns end-of-life care is not good enough for people to make an informed choice, and that some could feel pressured into the decision to save the NHS money.

He has also ordered a review into the potential costs of changing the law, warning it could come at the expense of other NHS services if implemented.

Baroness Harman said Mr Streeting has “crossed the line in two ways”.

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“He should not have said how he was going to vote, because that breaches neutrality and sends a signal,” she said.

“And secondly… he’s said the problem is that it will cost money to bring in an assisted dying measure, and therefore he will have to cut other services.

“But paradoxically, he also said it would be a slippery slope because people will be forced to bring about their own death in order to save the NHS money. Well, it can’t be doing both things.

“It can’t be both costing the NHS money and saving the NHS money.”

Baroness Harman said the argument “should not come down to resources” as it is a “huge moral issue” affecting “only a tiny number of people”.

She added that people should not mistake Mr Streeting for being “a kind of proxy for Keir Starmer”.

“The government is genuinely neutral and all of those backbenchers, they can vote whichever way they want,” she added.

Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has previously expressed support for assisted dying, but it is not clear how he intends to vote on the issue or if he will make his decision public ahead of time.

The cabinet has varying views on the topic, with the likes of Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood siding with Mr Streeting in her opposition but Energy Secretary Ed Miliband being for it.

The Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill is being championed by Labour backbencher Kim Leadbeater, who wants to give people with six months left to live the choice to end their lives.

Under her proposals, two independent doctors must confirm a patient is eligible for assisted dying and a High Court judge must give their approval.

The bill will also include punishments of up to 14 years in prison for those who break the law, including coercing someone into ending their own life.

MPs will debate and vote on the legislation on 29 November, in what will be the first Commons vote on assisted dying since 2015, when the proposal was defeated.