Council tax revaluation

This may be a little out of date now - as I've found it as a saved post on blogger that I meant to put onto the blog a couple of weeks ago. The topic of the day was council tax revaluation. The story was that covert methods were being used to re-band houses that had good views or nice gardens in order to bump them up to a different band.

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I've been contacted by a constituent who was convinced that the recent stories about central government encouraging council tax revaluations didn't paint the whole story. Their concern was that the council were "in" on this, and it was just a different way for Cheshire East to get more money out of them.

This isn't the case, and can be proved by the way the council tax setting process works. This information is open to the public, and is all included in the papers for the budget meeting.

Essentially, the council decides how much it's going to spend in each department. It forecasts how much income we will receive from fees and fines, etc, and that leaves us with a deficit which will be paid for by council tax.

The council tax is then set by dividing this up into the different bands.

If a house is moved from one band to another, it does not result in the council getting more money - the total "take" from council tax has already been set. It just means that a bit more comes in from the higher bands, and in theory the lower bands can all pay a little bit less.

So what's the point in the revaluation? I suppose it's to try and make the system a bit fairer. I just hope that some properties get revised down as well as up.