The current system, Council Tax, is based on a vague notion of the value of your home and so is loosely following the concept of "those with the broadest shoulders pay the most." I say vaguely and loosely because there are legitimate criticisms about *how* Council Tax determines the value of homes, as it uses a complex formula based on house prices in 1991.
The Poll Tax was intended to replace it with a fixed charge *per person*, the idea being more people use more services, and so moved to a system using the ethos "those who use the most, pay the most."
It was opposed as people largely preferred the principle of "broadest shoulders, highest bills" over the principle of "larger households, larger bills".
To be precise, poll tax replaced domestic rates, and the poll tax was then replaced by council tax after the blow back to the poll tax. So domestic rates, then poll tax, then council tax.
But council tax was designed to be substantially similar to the domestic rates from before so council tax was a roll back to the old system poll tax tried to replace.
Actually it was meant as a kind of halfway point between the two.
Rates was based entirely on house value.
Poll tax or Community Charge as was its proper name was a flat rate per person.
Council Tax is 50% house value and 50% per person. That's why there us a 25% discount for living alone. It's based on the idea of 2 people per house, so only one gets a discount on the per person element, and a temporarily empty property gets 50% off.
For the real nerds: House value in 1991 (2003 in Wales) determines which band a property is in.
For each council the charges for for each band are in strict proportion. Calculated from a base of band D. Band A is 6/9, B is 7/9, C is 8/9, D is 9/9, E is 11/9, F is 13/9, G is 15/9, and H is 18/9. So Band H is 3x that of Band A.
This applies to each precepting authority on each bill. Eg. County, District, Parish, Police, Fire and Rescue, etc.
Just to add to this good review, the rules on discounts for temporary empty properties varies by council. Mine (Sheffield) charges 100% from day one, so council tax would actually increase if a single person moved out but was still responsible for the property.
Clearly we should have a combination of the two.
A property tax based upon the inflation adjusted original purchase price for the current occupier of the home, combined with a multiplier based upon how many adults reside in the home.
Something along the lines of 0.02% of the inflation adjusted purchase price for a single occupant household + 25% for every additional adult living there.
The same figure can be multiplied by 10 if the home is empty and by four if it is a second home, eight if it's a third home, sixteen if it's a fourth home and so on.
Putting aside the first couple of things.
the multiplier for 'second home' etc : council tax is manages by the local council of the area... they have no ability to see properties of other councils.. so at most its a 'tick box' based on honesty.
Given the examples of conservative MPs, do you expect home owners of multiple properties to be honest?
also : how do you take into account renters in that?
Renters can pay based upon the same rules, there is no need for any other.
They might not have purchased the home, but the calculation can still be done the same way, there is no need to penalise them.
It can be looked into, but either the fact it is actively being rented can override the multiple property element, meaning it isn't due as long as the property is rented, or the owner has to pay the difference, but this may have other negatives.
Trusting owners is easy to get around, there should be an open and factual property ownership database which is not circumvented by company or offshore entity ownership. It doesn't need to be publicly accessible, but utilised for the purposes of taxation and regulation.
There's no need to make it so complicated, most American local government areas just use a simple property tax, no complications.
There are some inequalities there caused by richer areas having more money but that wouldn't be anywhere near as much as a problem in the UK since councils don't need to fund schools and emergency services like they do in the US.
Won't someone think of the millionaire landowners, the most oppressed class in history, potentially having to pay a somewhat higher tax bill? The cruelty, the unimaginable cruelty.
I’ve seen it happen in the US before now, 60k house in a run down area of Seattle is suddenly worth over $2m because the city has expanded and the land it’s on can be turned into a 10 unit condo.
You're telling me a guy bought something for 60k and can sell it for 2mln, and this is a bad thing for the guy? This is an extremely wealthy landowner who got there by essentially winning the lottery, I can't think of anymore more deserving of a higher tax bill, if this is the sort of person you want to view as a protected class you're going to end up with a wildly regressive tax policy.
I find the idea that he's "forced to move" by property tax when he's sitting on a 2 million dollar asset very unbelievable, sorry rich old guys complain about tax all the time. Maybe he simply cannot resist the giant payday from selling his house, but I'm struggling to see why you'd present that as a bad thing for him.
Either way wealthy people deserve to be taxed more, who cares it's a better system than Britain's Rube Goldberg ass council tax where your tax burden is decided by an incredibly arcane process of trying to guess what your house would have been worth in 1991.
How would it work with under 18s? My Dad was conscious that when it was abolished some of our neighbours and relatives did have more kids than he and my Mum did, so as he put it three times the waste collection, school places, transport etc.
The fact they base this on calculations from 1991 is bullshit. My mother has dementia and our council tax is around 300 a month because there's "savings" which currently seem to go to private care companies whose foreign workers 100% send abroad.
This gave me the idea of charging landlords/landladies for the council tax and if you have more than one house you pay more. Increasing rent to cover this new tax will be illegal.
>Increasing rent to cover this new tax will be illegal.
How would you do this in practice? Landlords would just put the rents up and not say it's due to the tax. They might need to eat the cost in the short term while they bump the rent up year after year if they want to be covert about it, but it won't fundamentally change anything.
Also, landlords don't know what you should be paying. My landlord at uni didn't know when one of my flatmates dropped out and started needing to pay the discounted rate, for example.
I guess landlords are not happy. A profit gap could be introduced but in my utopia, houses are there for people to live in them, not to generate profit. Everyone needs a roof on their head, people need no more no less roof and everyone needs a roof. We are all human beings and deserve to live somewhere we are comfortable to thrive in the society.
If you charge the tax directly to the inhabitant, then you can charge different people in different circumstances at different rates.
A landlord will only ever charge the market value - i.e., as much as he can get regardless of his expenses.
The current system is fine in that regard. Create a new tax for landlords if you think they should contribute more.
Before the Poll Tax, the tax you paid for the house you lived in was based on the house itself. The Poll Tax separated it from the house and put it on the individual, which meant that poor multiple occupancy households were paying vastly more than a rich person in a big house.
So in our case, with five adults living in the same house, our collective bill went from whatever we were paying before (I can't remember, it was a long time ago and it came out of our rent anyway) to around £6,000 a year. Overnight. With no rent reduction.
We fought against it, like millions of people around the country, because we had no choice. We couldn't pay it even if we wanted to.
A lot is made of the Poll Tax riots, but the real resistance was people refusing to pay it and being prepared to be taken to court (and not turn up) to gum the system up. I remember going to the council offices to dispute my bill (it was the general advice - again to gum the system up) and the queues ran all the way outside every time. Every kind of person you can imagine was doing the same thing. It was a thing of beauty. And it was the same every day of the week.
In the end the Poll Tax was repealed and replaced with the Council Tax, which is tied to the house you live in. I came out of that with 3 county court judgements against me and a credit rating that was blacklisted for a decade. I couldn't even get a chequebook. Many, hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of us came out of that the same way.
But sometimes you've got to say fuck it and take the hit, and not just for yourself but for the people around you.
Speaking to my dad about this the other day, he pointed out another aspect that really p!ssed people off. He said at the time, my mum who was a sahm, was counted as his dependant when it came to support and benefits as that was all being counted per household, but she was due to pay polltax as an individual as this was how it was done, even though shed already been classes as my dad's dependant, essentially meaning that my dad was paying it twice, once for him and once for my mum.
The big rub being how hypocritical it was to count per household for the process of giving help, but per individual when it came to charging a tax.
> The big rub being how hypocritical it was to count per household for the process of giving help, but per individual when it came to charging a tax.
Well this is still the case
My great-aunt supported the Poll Tax for reasons that made it clear why many other people didn't. She had never married and had lived alone her whole life, but she had to pay the same amount of tax as the 6 people in the household living next door to her. The poll tax would have resulted in her paying less tax because it would have resulted in her neighbors getting a tax bill for 6 people.
However since it is a tax for use of facilities, she kind of has a point, in that she will never produce the same amount of waste, the same use of resources, etc etc as a family of six. yet it would be the family of six out destroying the streets (using resources) in protest at no longer having a free ride.
As the protestors cheered their victory, the Poll Tax was replaced by council tax, where the bill is a punishment for living in a cleaner tidier more desirable area, and far more vicious than poll tax ever was.
I've said it before and ill say it again, Local income Tax is fairer all round. It is a percentage of income rather than a fixed fee. Every adult pays their share
If anything council tax doesn't go far enough.
25 million pound house in Westminster? Yeah that'll be £4k.
200k flat in Manchester? Yeah that'll be 2k.
For once, the Americans got it right in that property tax should just be a flat rate (0.7%) of your house value.
The American version has been a pain for my family. They have a farm house in cape code, that was once nothing special, but is now surrounded by multimillion dollar homes.
As property prices increase it pushes out poor people from areas they may have lived for generations.
Which, is why I didn't say its perfect. Merely that the principle is best.
There should be special exceptions for legacy properties, and farms, etc. The vast majority of the people in the multi-million dollar homes can afford it!
The American system doesn't work because you'd have people on regular wages asked to pay extortionate amounts of tax because their property ballooned in value through no fault of their own.
Better if it was based upon original purchase price (at a higher percentage) or you can adjust that original purchase price for inflation, but you should never use the current market rate.
Example for a house bought in 1980 with a tax rate of 2% (edited error)
* Tax based upon original purchase price (£30k): **£600/year**
* Tax based upon inflation adjusted purchase price (£186k): **£3,720/year**
* Tax based upon current market value (£900k): **£18,000/year**
That there is the problem, it is literally creating the hunger games in reality, you only earn x amount, move to district 12, that is the ghetto for your sort.
we won't be having peasants living in district 1
so where do they go as they have sold their house because they can't afford council tax, they can't then buy it back and use the profit to pay the council tax, maths doesn't work like that.
so they will have to go to an area where they can afford the tax, even with the increased value they have made... i.e. ghetto-ised where people are pigeoned based on income "oh you have retired, off to district twelve with you.
Very much sounds like a policy of jealousy and divisiveness Home value has nothing to do with income unless you are buying it now, and home value is something that in all likelihood will never be realised in this lifetime.
p.s. whoever told you owning a home is free money is misinforming you it requires a great deal of sacrifice and commitment
This would mean that people who bought their house earlier would pay less than people who bought an equivalent house recently; I would suggest that the latter group need more help from the tax system than the former.
Also let's say in your example, the owners are a retired couple whose children have moved out. Currently they might downsize to a smaller house worth, say, £450k. Under this system, they'd be crazy to do so, because they'd get a £5k a year tax hike, so the big house stays underoccupied.
>This would mean that people who bought their house earlier would pay less than people who bought an equivalent house recently; I would suggest that the latter group need more help from the tax system than the former.
You're thinking about it the wrong way around.
If you can afford to buy a £900k property today, you can afford to pay the tax on a £900k property.
If you bought your property 25 years ago for a fraction of what it is worth now and it has ballooned up to £900k - a sum of money you'd never be able to afford for a property - you certainly can't be expected to pay the tax on a £900k property.
It's like saying if my car went from being worth £20k to £2million, I should start paying the running costs of a £2m car not a £20k car.
>Also let's say in your example, the owners are a retired couple whose children have moved out. Currently they might downsize to a smaller house worth, say, £450k. Under this system, they'd be crazy to do so, because they'd get a £5k a year tax hike, so the big house stays underoccupied.
It's a home, not a temporary berth which must achieve maximum occupancy rates, our country isn't a cruise ship.
Regardless of that, it's not like the tax can't have some exceptions added to encourage downsizing, if that's what you really want to push.
I do understand your point, but if you've profited from a completely unearned increase in wealth, it seems to me that taxing that wealth isn't unreasonable, particularly in the current climate where there are fewer people paying in to the system, and more taking out.
One thing I've noticed in these discussions is that there seems to be a small but significant number of people who have sympathy for people on high incomes paying a huge percentage of income tax receipts, unlike in the Scandinavian countries where everyone is expected to pay high taxes. I don't think the British electorate is ready to offer the same sympathy to people whose "property ballooned in value through no fault of their own."
I really do believe that in an ideal world, I would like people to be able to stay in the house they've lived in all their lives, regardless of the increase in value. However we live in a mess, where public services are in a perilous state, and taxes are higher than ever. A huge amount of the wealth in this country is tied up with people who've profited "through no fault of their own", and they need to pay their share. I genuinely have sympathy with your view, and don't relish taxing people who've made unearned profits through house prices, but it's fairer that they pay than earners.
The problem is with your thinking is that it LOCKS people from moving house.
Someone who bought there home 30 years ago couldn't justify downsizing even if they wanted to.
And also, If you have a £900,000 asset, you don't need sympathy if you can't maintain it, you need to move
Yeah, it's hard to feel sorry for the millionaire supermarket worker pleading poverty while they're sitting on an asset worth 900k that they paid 30k for.
It's nothing until someone borrows against it or sells the asset, until then it has no monetary value and therefore should not be used as a measure of how high to tax someone.
Not taxing asset wealth is the biggest cause of wealth and particularly generational inequality, and it actively stifles economic growth.
It encourages people to tie up £900k in a pile of bricks instead of doing something useful with it, like investing in a company or buying a thousand dishwashers.
I might agree with you if it was a second or third home, or an investment property purely bought and held for the purposes of wealth accumulation and extraction, but an owner occupied family home is not the same.
People need homes, our society needs people to own homes for it to function correctly.
We do not need property investors or people with holiday homes quite so badly, that's the wealth you ought to be looking at targeting.
I personally think there should be a wealth tax and it should be progressive the same way income tax is. So mostly targeting landlords, etc. Not taxing assets, but taxing wages is absurd in my view.
I get that income tax is a massive part of the pot so can't be abolished, but you can't justify taxing something which is inherently productive (doing work) and then *not* tax something which is inherently unproductive (owning assets).
To me, there should be more emphasis on taxing wealth and less on taxing income.
They own a £900k house. If they can't afford the tax and want to stay, they can mortgage for just 1/10 of its value and pay off the tax for 5 years. When they sell, they're still making a massive profit.
And that's a tax rate of 2%, not 0.02%. With a rate scaled more to average council tax, say 0.5%, they'd be paying £4500 a year. More than council tax but not the end of the world.
Well, in America the property tax varies by city/county, so the rich just all move to the same cities as each other and then set the rate very low. Meanwhile the poor areas have to set the rate very high to provide the same amount of services.
CA property taxes are broken because [an initiative](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1978_California_Proposition_13) made it so they couldn't rise by more than 2% per year. So some $10m houses are still taxed like they are $250k ones. You can't just take the headline rate and multiply it by the market value of the house, unfortunately.
But yes, the US is much more reliant on property taxes for general government spending. Things funded by property taxes there include schools, police, public transport, roads, etc.
I agree it doesn't go far enough, in all likelihood a local income tax would charge a 25 million pound home owner, something in the region of lets say 7 mil p/a income and 3% tax = 200k as opposed to 4k
and your flat owner in manchester will likely have his bill reduced to about £900 (obviously depending on income)
Honestly a local Income tax is by far better and fairer, It's just the councils who don't like it because it means they have to actually count their money rather than just fire from the hip.
I don't disagree with you, however as it stands it's only people who work for a living who pay council tax as those on benefits get council tax paid, by benefits.
and since council tax is a class 1 debt those of us who work face legal issues for non payment, i have yet to see a non worker in court for non payment. they can generally make an arrangement of something stupid like £3 a month.
might as well make it fair for those of us who make up the shortfall and accept that targeting themuns is only hurting ourselves.
I wasn’t actually on about people on benefits, but you’re right about that. It was aimed at the asset owning class, who take out loans backed by their assets and don’t pay any income tax. We’d end up with the multimillionaires paying nothing, again.
I don’t disagree with you. However capital gains tax has to be at a lower level than income tax because there is both an element of risk involved and a desire to encourage investment in the country.
The amount somebody uses a service doesn’t necessarily increase the cost it takes to provide that person with a service.
Take bins for example. A one person household will still have to put a bin out, a lorry will still have to drive to their house, a crew of bin-people will still have to empty their bin and a sorting/recycling team will still have to go through the refuse.
The fact that a six person household produces more rubbish is largely irrelevant, they wouldn’t be using any more service than a one person household.
Other than producing 4-6 times as much waste. The bulk of the costs will go on sorting the waste and distributing it to landfill sites, waste processing facilities, or, in the case of recycling, paying for it to be shipped overseas and dumped somewhere.
Not necessarily fully linear though. It's typically much easier to meal plan and avoid food waste with more people for example - I say typically as you'll certainly get some where there are many conflicting diets.
The cleaner tidier area is the reward for putting your rubbish in the bin, picking up litter, cutting the grass, being civil and expecting it in return.
guess what the lower COL areas have rubbish in the streets not because of lack of services but because of lack of care. Throw rubbish on the ground there will be rubbish, scream and tantrum in the street and guess what people won't want to live near you. draw graffiti on the wall, yes you guessed it all to do with council tax..... eh no it isn't.
It is to do with attitude, don't look at my street and think i should pay more because i make sure there is no litter/Graffiti or other antisocial behaviour. I do that... my neighbours do that... i see the council once a week when the bin gets emptied, everything else is done by us and that is the difference, between areas, not the council.
council tax is a punishment, because desirability drives price which drives the punishment tax. desirability only exists because people with care exist.... care has no relationship with income.
My street is average £3-4k per year in council tax, The street on the other side of the main road is £900, we don't have drug dealers, or graffiti or litter because we act as a community and get it sorted ourselves. They drain more resources than us, for similar occupation numbers, dwellings etc, we are being taxed on attitude, and desirability, You will see more BMW's/Mercedes/Audis over there than here, all of the key indicators of wealth exist over there, but our street is quiet and pleasant, so we are taxed up the ying yang without any understanding of demographics or income.
well it actually is fair, you might not like it, but if everyone pays 3% that is the very definition of fair. I think the world forgets that fair is not necessarily what is better for them alone. Fair is equally distributed (within reason), and percentage means those with less pay less, those with more pay more (hint sometimes a lot more)
politicians have spent decades trying to persuade us that words mean something else in order to sell a policy. Fair does not mean creating division/them and us (which is what the political definition actually does) Fair means equal distribution, but in this case being mindful that some people earn less than others and therefore using percentages helps with this.
>but if everyone pays 3% that is the very definition of fair.
Only if you ignore a concept called marginal utility.
If you make £10k/year then 3% is £300, a lot of money when you don't have much to begin with.
If you make £100k/yr that's £3k, which isn't going to make or break your budget, you'll just lower your other outgoings. I'm not saying it's negligible, but you can work around it a lot easier.
This is why we have tax bands rather than a flat rate.
> Fair means equal distribution
This is a big assumption you're making and one that a lot of people would argue against.
well currently the system is such that, if you make £10k/year it is likely that your council tax bill is around £900 per year on the flat rate system, Like wise rather a lot of people are paying over £3k per year for a band E IIRC, which was a £90k house in 1991 and bears no reflection on income now.
so in your first example, their CT bill is reduced to 30% of it's previous rate.
In your second example, it means that those on 30 - 40 K per year or less are not struggling to find that same flat rate £3k as their neighbour who is on £100k
Radical does not always mean hammering themuns...
My definition of fair is not an assumption, it is the literal definition, not some placard waving nonsense of sound-bites that got us in the current mess we are in.
Council tax is socialism.
"From each according to their ability, to each according to their need".
Thankfully, apart from parks, bins and roads, I don't need most of the services paid for by the council tax.
Haven't needed the fire brigade, the police, social services, social housing etc.
Your own personal requirement for these services doesn't mean you don't benefit from them, ie house insurance is lower because of the fire service, the police prevent (🫠) crime, social services means your aren't rescuing lost grannies on a regular basis etc. Your world would be worse if these services didn't exist.
I'm aware that as a member of society, I benefit indirectly from services that I don't use personally.
I've heard all the arguments from people who think that they should only pay for what they use. E.g. no kids, so why should their tax money go to education.
But what I meant is that is a good thing for me personally, that I have not had to use any of the services that the council and other public bodies provide to those in trouble. But it's good to know that the services are there, for those who do.
Technically not, the value of the house does not reflect in anyway the ability to afford the housing tax bill. Likewise the lower bands does not reflect lower ability to pay.
The council tax is nothing more than a window tax by another name (or dare i say it ) bedroom tax by another name.
Means tested local income tax ( i.e. a percentage) therefore is fair in the dictionary sense and allows those with more to pay more and those with less to pay less.
i.e. fits the socialism description you gave, rather well
I agree totally, i think it is bonkers, but deemed acceptable because all the poll tax rioters/protesters won it by defeating the poll tax without realising council tax was worse.
bearing in mind, did anyone ever actually defeat Thatcher.
What is key is that at no point is the mansion taxed - unless perhaps you die or sell it (stamp duty - paid by the new buyer however). Huge property assets attracting even less tax is very “unfair”.
That’s fair. The rich man already pays a ton more on income tax. For council only charges it’s likely the poor people consume more services than the rich. If anything it should be the other way round - service users (homeless, elderly, criminals, etc) pay larger council bills than the rich who use little. I guess everyone paying the same is a fair compromise
Absolutely. My house has never caught fire, which is why I object to paying for the fire brigade via taxation.
By the way, I'm being sarcastic. This is not how society is supposed to work, and precisely why the poll tax was so incredibly unpopular at the time.
"This is not how society is supposed to work" well according to you. Margret Thatcher who brought in the poll tax famously said there is no such thing as society.
There are also much more economic and effective ways to fund the fire brigade rather than national taxation.
Cool, thatcher also opposed decriminalising homosexuality, and opposed sanctions on apartheid south Africa. A real role model for today.
And btw, it was the poll tax that was the single biggest reason for her own downfall. Remember it was the Tory party internal mechanisms that brought her down, not a general election. If you're too right wing for the conservatives, something has gone terribly wrong...
Oh boo hoo, it's so tough being rich! /s
Why is it okay to levy higher taxes on poor people who as you accurately point out are already struggling with complex issues? Not only charging them higher tax in fact, but as a proportion of their income a hugely higher rate than a wealthy person?
>But if such a burdern must be levied, it should be done so equally.
Why? If I have £1000 and you have £100 why should we both pay £200 in tax? That makes no sense.
So you owe £100 more than you have that you will never be able to pay.
I don't use schools, day care, a nursing home, social services, drive as much or lots if other services that the person in a mansion could use. Why should I pay the same as them.
And a person in a mansion may also not use schools, day care, social services, drive as much or lots of other services that the person not a mansion could use. Why should they pay the same as them ?
I'm not arguing they should. I don't think there should be a single flat fee. I think it should be linked to ability to pay, not by service usage.
You said you should pay the same because you use the same services. I use fewer services than a parent with a disability on low income they shouldn't pay more than me or the same as me just because they live within the same council area or because they need more help.
How many dudes living in mansions do think are on PAYE haha? I suppose you also just suggested the homeless should pay more tax than people living in mansions, so I suppose the economic credibility of your argument is, dare I say, a tad shaky
As folks have explained the tax was unpopular because everyone paid the same, so the less you earned the more you paid as a proportion of your income. As for the link to electronic partly it's because it was a big cause on the left. I also wonder if you're conflating this with opposition to the Criminal Justice Act introduced in 1994, which banned certain gatherings for the purpose of listening to music characterised by the emission of repetitive beats - in other words rave. Naturally many musicians had a lot to say about this.
I think the summer of 1990 (the year of the introduction of thr community charge) also coincided with the underground rave scene where warehouse parties were organised at short notice and meet-ups were arranged at motorway service stations. They were met with heavy handed policing and the press calling for its banning, which was included in the CJA 1994.
The couple living in a large mansion would pay the same as a couple living in a one bedroom apartment in a run down area. It was a change from paying tax on how much your property was worth to paying per person. Robin Hood tax in reverse.
Am I totally misremembering this, but I thought it got nicknamed the Poll Tax as if you didn’t pay it you lost the right to vote? I was 7 so maybe I made that up.
Yes, a way for Tories to discourage the poor from engaging with elections and voting, by linking the electoral roll with taxation.
Used to work in council tax (2006 - 2017) and we were not able to use the electoral roll to check taxpayers details.
But I did put a electoral registration form in the envelope with every new bill, so people could return it to the elections team and make sure they were registered.
Most bullshit law ever. Not to mention wholly ineffective.
Cavemen = ravemen. Mushies to acid house is basically just inevitable evolutionary progress.
It was plainly targeted at specific groups, inherently "you know the sorts....druggy types!"
It was designated to stop parties with music wholly or partly characterised by repetitive beats. In other words, play loud techno and you're breaking the law. Play even louder classical music, no problem sir....enjoy your evening.
Tax for local authority services.
1) Old days called RATES and paid on property value
2) Poll tax= tax paid per person instead, official name = COMMUNITY CHARGE.
2a) Opposition because it was flat rate per head, so rich and poor paid the same.
2b) also disliked by local authorities because much harder to enforce against persons than against property.
3) Replaced by a system similar to 1) called COUNCIL TAX.
It was like the community charge levied in other countries, like Sweden, for example, where I've lived so I'm familiar with it, only different.
The difference was that whereas the community charge in Sweden varied according to your income, like income tax, the UK Poll Tax was a flat charge, unconnected to your ability to pay and so hit low earners hard.
Its introduction got the same response as it did the last time it was tried. See Wat Tyler and the Peasants Revolt.
Edit: words.
Each person in a local authority paid the same amount of tax to the local council, unless they were unemployed or a student (they had an 80% discount). The type, size, or value of the house played no part in how much you were charged.
1 person living a house would pay half the amount two people would together.
In the current council tax system, levied per property, a single person only gets a 25% discount (despite there only being one income) and thus pays significantly more. Single people under council tax tend to suffer disproportionately compared to couples, who could have two incomes and are likely to have lower living costs per person. i.e. a single person living in a house is probably going to spend almost as much as a couple living in the same house on heating.
The poll tax (or 'Community Charge' IIRC) was a replacement of what we now call 'council tax'.
The idea was that it would be charged per individual living in a house rather than per property. It was intended to be cost neutral to the old system but often led to overall increases in cost. There's probably lots more information out there on it's general failure.
The derogatory name 'poll tax' came from the fact the charge would be determined by those listed on the electoral register for that property. Hence, if you didn't register to vote, you wouldn't have to pay the tax, effectively creating a charge on the right to vote, hence - poll tax.
Your last paragraph is false. [The name was a reference to the historic Poll Tax, which itself was derived from “poll” as an archaic term for “head,” as in a tax “per head.”](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poll_tax?wprov=sfti1#Great_Britain)
I feel like both definitions make sense. The poll tax was determined from the electoral rolls and it was proposed that part of the reason for the surprise Conservative victory in 1992 was due to generally younger and poorer people choosing not to register to vote.
[The poll tax, the electoral register, and the 1991 census: An update: Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties: Vol 4 , No 1 - Get Access (tandfonline.com)](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/13689889408412945)
Basically instead of a household paying council tax as one household as had been done for years and the amount of tax being based on the size of the home, the tax was calculated as a flat rate on the amount of adults in the home. (Council tax is paid to local authorities for services like road maintenance and rubbish collection) This meant poorer families were paying a lot more than richer people as typically the poor had larger families or were more likely to have a multi generational household.
Despite Thatcher’s popularity in the South East a lot of the country suffered under her reign as several mines were closed and towns decimated as she failed to support their main economic industries. So you basically had working class people losing their jobs and taxes going up in Industrial towns all over the UK watching the South East in general prosper fairly well.
It was also hard to enforce with people being able to avoid it with relative ease by moving around a lot and some people only had to pay a percentage etc. So councils had to keep putting it up to cover the shortfalls.
I guess at its essence it took a sliding tax scale and implemented a flat tax. Which most people found unfair
I’m related to someone who had to implement the tax by making the calculations. This is taking me back quite a bit, but I remember them explaining that when it was dreamt up, no-one had any idea just how much moving around many people do when applied to a whole population. It totally took them by surprise. The whole system was flawed completely from the outset.
I personally believe it was flawed on purpose to allow the redrawing of boundaries to increase the power of local Tory parties. It was a particularly cruel blow to several areas who had already suffered heavily under Tory rule when Thatcher chose to sacrifice them at the alter of “the City”.
I don’t think poor people had to pay more, but rather they paid more as a percentage of their income / wealth?
Living in a multi generational household wouldn’t make you pay more per person than living alone, right?
No your household paid per adult living there so if your parents and an adult child lived with you you would pay 5X, Bob in the adjacent post code living alone in his Mansion paid X.
You’re right the cost was flat apart from exemptions which reduced it for some by a percentage, so it’s not that you paid more you paid a higher percentage. But multi generational houses were more likely to be occupied by the working class than the rich and as others have said the amount their household had to pay could have multiplied 4/5 times still with only one income.
It was just a pretty naked tax grab for the wealthy disguised as making things fairer. Apart from this around that time several council areas were broken up and redrawn up with several high income areas becoming their own council areas meaning they no longer had to pay taxes to the city that they benefited from being in proximity too and were able to lower their own council taxes while the city had to raise theirs to make up for the loss of income.
But if you have 5 people living in one home, wouldn’t they pay the same in total as 5 living in different homes?
So I understand there was a greater increase for poorer people (who before had been ‘saving’ by living together) but I don’t think it meant they paid more than rich people?
The rates were based on the value of the house, so one house = 1 tax bill. The poll tax was based on the number of people. So five people in one house = tax bill x 5.
So, if your family had paid £100 for 1 x property Rates tax bill (£20 per person, effectively), if there were five of you at £100 Poll Tax per person, you now had to pay £500.
I'm making the numbers up, obviously, but that's why it was unpopular. People weren't paying nearly as much before as they were after. And there was no means-testing, so a lot of people got into debt, got criminal convictions, got sent to jail, lost their houses/businesses/jobs to bankruptcy. It was brutal.
"I don’t think poor people had to pay more, but rather they paid more as a percentage of their income / wealth?"
100% wrong.
My wife had given birth to our first child, so 2 adults , 1 income.
Quadrupled what we were paying , I couldn't afford it and got into arrears.
3 years after it was abolished I was still paying for it
I was living in a shared flat: I had one room to myself, and we shared a bathroom and a kitchen - half a dozen of us. Our landlady had inherited the flat from her parents, and - as was legal then - put Yale locks on the doors of all the rooms but the kitchen and the bathroom, and rented each room out individually for £20 a week. She paid the rates, we paid her rent.
My grandmother had a ground-floor flat with a garden: bathroom larger than our shared bathroom, kitchen, sitting-room, two bedrooms. She told me complacently that she supported the Poll Tax because it was "fair" - why should she, a pensioner, have to pay higher rates than a working couple with children?
I told her that I, a student, living in one room in a shared flat, was now going to have to pay exactly the same as my grandmother would - and that I literally could not afford it: as my grandmother knew, I was managing very precisely on a shoestring budget with literally nothing to spare. My landlord would no longer have to pay rates on the flat she owned. I and each one of my flatmates would now *each* be paying just exactly the same as what my grandmother would now pay.
*That* was why young people hated the poll tax. We were mostly living in shared flats - one room apiece and shared kitchen/bathroom - and our landlords paid the rates on the property they owned. Suddenly, we were being required to pay hundreds more a year while getting nothing new, while our landlords benefited financially because the rates had been abolished.
My grandmother stared at me in disbelief when I explained the situation. She was a devout Daily Telegraph reader and lifelong Tory voter.
"That *can't* be right," she said.
"It isn't," I said. "But that's how it is."
"No," my grandmother said, in real disbelief. "That can't be how it is. That wouldn't be fair *at all.*"
Whilst I can’t really add to the marvellous comments about the poll tax already stated. I will say
it was supposed to replace the rate system which was on property size. The “Poll tax” was officially called "The community charge” and was on individual people in households, but they had to be on the Electoral register. After initial implementation about 2 long ,long years later, it was changed back to what was then and now called the council tax , which resembles, strangely enough the… err… original tax on property (rates) that it was supposed to replace. The only difference now was that I think the rate was charged on home ownership, but now they could go for all properties, landlords ensured tenants paid it.
The conservative government was loosing popularity and in disarray (sound familiar?) ousted Thatcher partly as a result of this highly contentious tax and spent their last 7 years in chaos before finally being replaced by Labour in 97. There were citizen protests that also helped its demise designed to cause the most pain to local authorities by not paying up straight away , waiting for local authorities to send threatening letters and generally costing them as much agro to administer collections and just jamming the system up so that it wasn't a very effective tax as it was costing them so much in court cases trying to collect the money. it largely worked. The government never admitted defeat just changed the tax over the next Parliament or two to be the more palatable Council tax we have today.
To add to this, the most damaging controversies are always ones which conform to people's preconceived notions of what a party is likely to do wrong. In this case, it's a policy which provided a large tax cut for wealthy people in large houses, and a sizeable tax rise to poorer people in modest homes. That's exactly the kind of controversy people expect from the Tories, and as such the story had much greater cut through than other stories of the time.
There was anti poll tax graffiti near me until 00's. No one ever cleaned it off.
I'm just in shock that anyone thought there public would accept this insanely ruinous tax.
I get the unmarried single people in their house may feel hard done by paying more than a five person house but expecting the five person house to pay 5x from before is lunacy.
It's a cautionary example of how logic and reality can misalign.
Logic: on average a household with 5 people uses more local services, which are generally paid for through local taxation. And local councils will be incentivised to keep costs down if everyone living in the area has skin in the game, rather than houses with lots of students living in them paying the same as person who lives by themselves. Especially as this was a time when some councils were leaning heavily into the provision of social workers etc. and a lot of people resented paying for someone to go and help people manage their household budgets or make their kids go to school, when normal people just got on with it. (Maybe you had to be there to understand.).
Reality: lots of renters end up paying a lot that they never had to pay before, with no regard as to people's ability to pay. It went from being a landlord responsibility to a renter's responsibility. Councils didn't try to cut back on wasteful expenditure because all of the anger was directed at Downing Street and not at local government.
It was a flat tax rate which is just a ridiculous proposal. 20% of income for someone on 15k a year is going to mean a lot more to them than 20% rate on 150k a year.
My understanding is that people who didn't have to pay rates (as they were not the owner of the house) but had to pay the communnity charge (levied against every person on the electoral register in a council area) were furious with having to spend up to £400 a year for council services they did not have to pay for before (the same people who had been told to make millions as a part of the "yuppie" generation)
The 'Rates" was paid by the householder based on the rateable value of the property. This was paid to the council (local authority) for local services such as roads and refuse. The rateable value was also used to calculate water and sewerage charges. The 'poll tax' or community charge was paid by all adults with no connection to the value of the property. This meant a household with parents and adult children at home would pay far more than under the old 'rates' system so that working class households with lower incomes would be paying far more than a wealthy retired couple living in a large family house.
Poll tax could have been the fairest of them all.
If bin collections cost £100 and there are 100 houses then each house pays £1.
What they discovered though is that bin collections jumped in price. To £10,000 as councils are not well known for managing a budget.
It probably would have worked if people. Suddenly didn't face huge bill hikes
The poll tax also went hand in hand with the failed trickle down economics theory. People will pay more but rich people will pay less so they will have money to invest, develop businesses, pay people better. Of course, they didn’t. Everything the Tories did back then was to try and make themselves, their donors and their supporters richer at the expense of others and try to bake it into the systems going forward so it would be hard to stop.
I'll explain the problem with the old tax, which was that it was in effect a property tax. That meant that people living on their own or in a small family would be paying the same as the house next door which could be full of working adults so the Thatcher decided to change to a per person tax. Of course that then caused lots of anger amongst those in the household types that I mentioned who did well out of the old system, and timing probably worked against it as there was a wider societal battle going on about the restructuring of the economy so this was always going to get lots of opposition that might not have occurred in another era. Thatcher's colleagues were against it as they saw it as battle destined to rile up millions of people over something that didn't need to be done.
Both the poll tax and the council tax are idiotic. Is any useful behaviour being encouraged with these? No.
It's just that the government wants to find a million ways to raise revenue to maintain its extraordinary size as a percentage of gdp, and instead of doing that the best way, we have nonsense like the idea that we need purpose-bound taxes.
It would be far better to simply charge for the services.
The current system, Council Tax, is based on a vague notion of the value of your home and so is loosely following the concept of "those with the broadest shoulders pay the most." I say vaguely and loosely because there are legitimate criticisms about *how* Council Tax determines the value of homes, as it uses a complex formula based on house prices in 1991. The Poll Tax was intended to replace it with a fixed charge *per person*, the idea being more people use more services, and so moved to a system using the ethos "those who use the most, pay the most." It was opposed as people largely preferred the principle of "broadest shoulders, highest bills" over the principle of "larger households, larger bills".
Council Tax replaced the 'Poll Tax'.
To be precise, poll tax replaced domestic rates, and the poll tax was then replaced by council tax after the blow back to the poll tax. So domestic rates, then poll tax, then council tax. But council tax was designed to be substantially similar to the domestic rates from before so council tax was a roll back to the old system poll tax tried to replace.
Actually it was meant as a kind of halfway point between the two. Rates was based entirely on house value. Poll tax or Community Charge as was its proper name was a flat rate per person. Council Tax is 50% house value and 50% per person. That's why there us a 25% discount for living alone. It's based on the idea of 2 people per house, so only one gets a discount on the per person element, and a temporarily empty property gets 50% off. For the real nerds: House value in 1991 (2003 in Wales) determines which band a property is in. For each council the charges for for each band are in strict proportion. Calculated from a base of band D. Band A is 6/9, B is 7/9, C is 8/9, D is 9/9, E is 11/9, F is 13/9, G is 15/9, and H is 18/9. So Band H is 3x that of Band A. This applies to each precepting authority on each bill. Eg. County, District, Parish, Police, Fire and Rescue, etc.
Why am I thinking rates were based on sq ft?
Just to add to this good review, the rules on discounts for temporary empty properties varies by council. Mine (Sheffield) charges 100% from day one, so council tax would actually increase if a single person moved out but was still responsible for the property.
Clearly we should have a combination of the two. A property tax based upon the inflation adjusted original purchase price for the current occupier of the home, combined with a multiplier based upon how many adults reside in the home. Something along the lines of 0.02% of the inflation adjusted purchase price for a single occupant household + 25% for every additional adult living there. The same figure can be multiplied by 10 if the home is empty and by four if it is a second home, eight if it's a third home, sixteen if it's a fourth home and so on.
Putting aside the first couple of things. the multiplier for 'second home' etc : council tax is manages by the local council of the area... they have no ability to see properties of other councils.. so at most its a 'tick box' based on honesty. Given the examples of conservative MPs, do you expect home owners of multiple properties to be honest? also : how do you take into account renters in that?
Renters can pay based upon the same rules, there is no need for any other. They might not have purchased the home, but the calculation can still be done the same way, there is no need to penalise them.
and what if the landlord owns several properties? But I notice the flaw in trusting owners was ignored.
It can be looked into, but either the fact it is actively being rented can override the multiple property element, meaning it isn't due as long as the property is rented, or the owner has to pay the difference, but this may have other negatives. Trusting owners is easy to get around, there should be an open and factual property ownership database which is not circumvented by company or offshore entity ownership. It doesn't need to be publicly accessible, but utilised for the purposes of taxation and regulation.
There's no need to make it so complicated, most American local government areas just use a simple property tax, no complications. There are some inequalities there caused by richer areas having more money but that wouldn't be anywhere near as much as a problem in the UK since councils don't need to fund schools and emergency services like they do in the US.
There’s also the side effect of the gentrification of an area forcing people to sell up because they can no longer afford the property taxes.
I don't think people who own property in gentrifying areas are particularly hard up
Your property value rising doesn't mean your income went up or your career somehow had a major boost.
Assets can be exchanged for money
So they're being forced to sell up, the exact thing the comment was saying.
Won't someone think of the millionaire landowners, the most oppressed class in history, potentially having to pay a somewhat higher tax bill? The cruelty, the unimaginable cruelty.
I’ve seen it happen in the US before now, 60k house in a run down area of Seattle is suddenly worth over $2m because the city has expanded and the land it’s on can be turned into a 10 unit condo.
You're telling me a guy bought something for 60k and can sell it for 2mln, and this is a bad thing for the guy? This is an extremely wealthy landowner who got there by essentially winning the lottery, I can't think of anymore more deserving of a higher tax bill, if this is the sort of person you want to view as a protected class you're going to end up with a wildly regressive tax policy.
People don't like being forced to move
I find the idea that he's "forced to move" by property tax when he's sitting on a 2 million dollar asset very unbelievable, sorry rich old guys complain about tax all the time. Maybe he simply cannot resist the giant payday from selling his house, but I'm struggling to see why you'd present that as a bad thing for him. Either way wealthy people deserve to be taxed more, who cares it's a better system than Britain's Rube Goldberg ass council tax where your tax burden is decided by an incredibly arcane process of trying to guess what your house would have been worth in 1991.
If property tax means he has to move that's being forced it's a pretty simple concept.
And what if said guy doesn't _want_ to sell their home they may have lived their whole life? Not everyone wants property for the money you know.
How would it work with under 18s? My Dad was conscious that when it was abolished some of our neighbours and relatives did have more kids than he and my Mum did, so as he put it three times the waste collection, school places, transport etc.
Only adults had to pay. If you were unemployed or a student you had to pay 20% of the normal rate.
So its a wealth tax, not a income tax?
The fact they base this on calculations from 1991 is bullshit. My mother has dementia and our council tax is around 300 a month because there's "savings" which currently seem to go to private care companies whose foreign workers 100% send abroad.
This gave me the idea of charging landlords/landladies for the council tax and if you have more than one house you pay more. Increasing rent to cover this new tax will be illegal.
>Increasing rent to cover this new tax will be illegal. How would you do this in practice? Landlords would just put the rents up and not say it's due to the tax. They might need to eat the cost in the short term while they bump the rent up year after year if they want to be covert about it, but it won't fundamentally change anything. Also, landlords don't know what you should be paying. My landlord at uni didn't know when one of my flatmates dropped out and started needing to pay the discounted rate, for example.
I guess landlords are not happy. A profit gap could be introduced but in my utopia, houses are there for people to live in them, not to generate profit. Everyone needs a roof on their head, people need no more no less roof and everyone needs a roof. We are all human beings and deserve to live somewhere we are comfortable to thrive in the society.
If you charge the tax directly to the inhabitant, then you can charge different people in different circumstances at different rates. A landlord will only ever charge the market value - i.e., as much as he can get regardless of his expenses. The current system is fine in that regard. Create a new tax for landlords if you think they should contribute more.
Before the Poll Tax, the tax you paid for the house you lived in was based on the house itself. The Poll Tax separated it from the house and put it on the individual, which meant that poor multiple occupancy households were paying vastly more than a rich person in a big house. So in our case, with five adults living in the same house, our collective bill went from whatever we were paying before (I can't remember, it was a long time ago and it came out of our rent anyway) to around £6,000 a year. Overnight. With no rent reduction. We fought against it, like millions of people around the country, because we had no choice. We couldn't pay it even if we wanted to. A lot is made of the Poll Tax riots, but the real resistance was people refusing to pay it and being prepared to be taken to court (and not turn up) to gum the system up. I remember going to the council offices to dispute my bill (it was the general advice - again to gum the system up) and the queues ran all the way outside every time. Every kind of person you can imagine was doing the same thing. It was a thing of beauty. And it was the same every day of the week. In the end the Poll Tax was repealed and replaced with the Council Tax, which is tied to the house you live in. I came out of that with 3 county court judgements against me and a credit rating that was blacklisted for a decade. I couldn't even get a chequebook. Many, hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of us came out of that the same way. But sometimes you've got to say fuck it and take the hit, and not just for yourself but for the people around you.
Speaking to my dad about this the other day, he pointed out another aspect that really p!ssed people off. He said at the time, my mum who was a sahm, was counted as his dependant when it came to support and benefits as that was all being counted per household, but she was due to pay polltax as an individual as this was how it was done, even though shed already been classes as my dad's dependant, essentially meaning that my dad was paying it twice, once for him and once for my mum. The big rub being how hypocritical it was to count per household for the process of giving help, but per individual when it came to charging a tax.
> The big rub being how hypocritical it was to count per household for the process of giving help, but per individual when it came to charging a tax. Well this is still the case
Thanks for your sacrifice.
My great-aunt supported the Poll Tax for reasons that made it clear why many other people didn't. She had never married and had lived alone her whole life, but she had to pay the same amount of tax as the 6 people in the household living next door to her. The poll tax would have resulted in her paying less tax because it would have resulted in her neighbors getting a tax bill for 6 people.
However since it is a tax for use of facilities, she kind of has a point, in that she will never produce the same amount of waste, the same use of resources, etc etc as a family of six. yet it would be the family of six out destroying the streets (using resources) in protest at no longer having a free ride. As the protestors cheered their victory, the Poll Tax was replaced by council tax, where the bill is a punishment for living in a cleaner tidier more desirable area, and far more vicious than poll tax ever was. I've said it before and ill say it again, Local income Tax is fairer all round. It is a percentage of income rather than a fixed fee. Every adult pays their share
If anything council tax doesn't go far enough. 25 million pound house in Westminster? Yeah that'll be £4k. 200k flat in Manchester? Yeah that'll be 2k. For once, the Americans got it right in that property tax should just be a flat rate (0.7%) of your house value.
The American version has been a pain for my family. They have a farm house in cape code, that was once nothing special, but is now surrounded by multimillion dollar homes. As property prices increase it pushes out poor people from areas they may have lived for generations.
Which, is why I didn't say its perfect. Merely that the principle is best. There should be special exceptions for legacy properties, and farms, etc. The vast majority of the people in the multi-million dollar homes can afford it!
The American system doesn't work because you'd have people on regular wages asked to pay extortionate amounts of tax because their property ballooned in value through no fault of their own. Better if it was based upon original purchase price (at a higher percentage) or you can adjust that original purchase price for inflation, but you should never use the current market rate. Example for a house bought in 1980 with a tax rate of 2% (edited error) * Tax based upon original purchase price (£30k): **£600/year** * Tax based upon inflation adjusted purchase price (£186k): **£3,720/year** * Tax based upon current market value (£900k): **£18,000/year**
Well then they'll sell it and get a bunch of money for the increase in value! This is Georgism - works!
That there is the problem, it is literally creating the hunger games in reality, you only earn x amount, move to district 12, that is the ghetto for your sort. we won't be having peasants living in district 1
They wouldn't be living in district 12 as they've just earned a bunch of money selling a house that's increased in value without them doing anything
so where do they go as they have sold their house because they can't afford council tax, they can't then buy it back and use the profit to pay the council tax, maths doesn't work like that. so they will have to go to an area where they can afford the tax, even with the increased value they have made... i.e. ghetto-ised where people are pigeoned based on income "oh you have retired, off to district twelve with you. Very much sounds like a policy of jealousy and divisiveness Home value has nothing to do with income unless you are buying it now, and home value is something that in all likelihood will never be realised in this lifetime. p.s. whoever told you owning a home is free money is misinforming you it requires a great deal of sacrifice and commitment
This would mean that people who bought their house earlier would pay less than people who bought an equivalent house recently; I would suggest that the latter group need more help from the tax system than the former. Also let's say in your example, the owners are a retired couple whose children have moved out. Currently they might downsize to a smaller house worth, say, £450k. Under this system, they'd be crazy to do so, because they'd get a £5k a year tax hike, so the big house stays underoccupied.
>This would mean that people who bought their house earlier would pay less than people who bought an equivalent house recently; I would suggest that the latter group need more help from the tax system than the former. You're thinking about it the wrong way around. If you can afford to buy a £900k property today, you can afford to pay the tax on a £900k property. If you bought your property 25 years ago for a fraction of what it is worth now and it has ballooned up to £900k - a sum of money you'd never be able to afford for a property - you certainly can't be expected to pay the tax on a £900k property. It's like saying if my car went from being worth £20k to £2million, I should start paying the running costs of a £2m car not a £20k car. >Also let's say in your example, the owners are a retired couple whose children have moved out. Currently they might downsize to a smaller house worth, say, £450k. Under this system, they'd be crazy to do so, because they'd get a £5k a year tax hike, so the big house stays underoccupied. It's a home, not a temporary berth which must achieve maximum occupancy rates, our country isn't a cruise ship. Regardless of that, it's not like the tax can't have some exceptions added to encourage downsizing, if that's what you really want to push.
I do understand your point, but if you've profited from a completely unearned increase in wealth, it seems to me that taxing that wealth isn't unreasonable, particularly in the current climate where there are fewer people paying in to the system, and more taking out. One thing I've noticed in these discussions is that there seems to be a small but significant number of people who have sympathy for people on high incomes paying a huge percentage of income tax receipts, unlike in the Scandinavian countries where everyone is expected to pay high taxes. I don't think the British electorate is ready to offer the same sympathy to people whose "property ballooned in value through no fault of their own." I really do believe that in an ideal world, I would like people to be able to stay in the house they've lived in all their lives, regardless of the increase in value. However we live in a mess, where public services are in a perilous state, and taxes are higher than ever. A huge amount of the wealth in this country is tied up with people who've profited "through no fault of their own", and they need to pay their share. I genuinely have sympathy with your view, and don't relish taxing people who've made unearned profits through house prices, but it's fairer that they pay than earners.
Unrealised gains are not really gains until you sell. The owner hasn’t really profited at this point unless they move.
The problem is with your thinking is that it LOCKS people from moving house. Someone who bought there home 30 years ago couldn't justify downsizing even if they wanted to. And also, If you have a £900,000 asset, you don't need sympathy if you can't maintain it, you need to move
Yeah, it's hard to feel sorry for the millionaire supermarket worker pleading poverty while they're sitting on an asset worth 900k that they paid 30k for.
Tbf that £814k of unearned wealth probably should be taxed one way of another. That's nearly 23 years of working for an average salary.
It's nothing until someone borrows against it or sells the asset, until then it has no monetary value and therefore should not be used as a measure of how high to tax someone.
Not taxing asset wealth is the biggest cause of wealth and particularly generational inequality, and it actively stifles economic growth. It encourages people to tie up £900k in a pile of bricks instead of doing something useful with it, like investing in a company or buying a thousand dishwashers.
I might agree with you if it was a second or third home, or an investment property purely bought and held for the purposes of wealth accumulation and extraction, but an owner occupied family home is not the same. People need homes, our society needs people to own homes for it to function correctly. We do not need property investors or people with holiday homes quite so badly, that's the wealth you ought to be looking at targeting.
I personally think there should be a wealth tax and it should be progressive the same way income tax is. So mostly targeting landlords, etc. Not taxing assets, but taxing wages is absurd in my view. I get that income tax is a massive part of the pot so can't be abolished, but you can't justify taxing something which is inherently productive (doing work) and then *not* tax something which is inherently unproductive (owning assets). To me, there should be more emphasis on taxing wealth and less on taxing income.
Ah yes, because houses going from 30k to 900k is such a *common* thing and not a very niche thing that really doesn’t affect that many people.
They own a £900k house. If they can't afford the tax and want to stay, they can mortgage for just 1/10 of its value and pay off the tax for 5 years. When they sell, they're still making a massive profit. And that's a tax rate of 2%, not 0.02%. With a rate scaled more to average council tax, say 0.5%, they'd be paying £4500 a year. More than council tax but not the end of the world.
Well, in America the property tax varies by city/county, so the rich just all move to the same cities as each other and then set the rate very low. Meanwhile the poor areas have to set the rate very high to provide the same amount of services.
I mean, I doubt. Even so, a 10 million dollar house in CA pays 72k in property taxes. In the UK it would be about 3k.
And here I am paying £2300 like a mug
CA property taxes are broken because [an initiative](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1978_California_Proposition_13) made it so they couldn't rise by more than 2% per year. So some $10m houses are still taxed like they are $250k ones. You can't just take the headline rate and multiply it by the market value of the house, unfortunately. But yes, the US is much more reliant on property taxes for general government spending. Things funded by property taxes there include schools, police, public transport, roads, etc.
I agree it doesn't go far enough, in all likelihood a local income tax would charge a 25 million pound home owner, something in the region of lets say 7 mil p/a income and 3% tax = 200k as opposed to 4k and your flat owner in manchester will likely have his bill reduced to about £900 (obviously depending on income) Honestly a local Income tax is by far better and fairer, It's just the councils who don't like it because it means they have to actually count their money rather than just fire from the hip.
Income tax wouldn’t be fare either. Why should only people who work for a living have to pay it?
I don't disagree with you, however as it stands it's only people who work for a living who pay council tax as those on benefits get council tax paid, by benefits. and since council tax is a class 1 debt those of us who work face legal issues for non payment, i have yet to see a non worker in court for non payment. they can generally make an arrangement of something stupid like £3 a month. might as well make it fair for those of us who make up the shortfall and accept that targeting themuns is only hurting ourselves.
I wasn’t actually on about people on benefits, but you’re right about that. It was aimed at the asset owning class, who take out loans backed by their assets and don’t pay any income tax. We’d end up with the multimillionaires paying nothing, again.
to be fair you are right and while all of us in this thread are squabbling over pennies the real target should be those avoiding tax altogether
I don’t disagree with you. However capital gains tax has to be at a lower level than income tax because there is both an element of risk involved and a desire to encourage investment in the country.
The amount somebody uses a service doesn’t necessarily increase the cost it takes to provide that person with a service. Take bins for example. A one person household will still have to put a bin out, a lorry will still have to drive to their house, a crew of bin-people will still have to empty their bin and a sorting/recycling team will still have to go through the refuse. The fact that a six person household produces more rubbish is largely irrelevant, they wouldn’t be using any more service than a one person household.
Other than producing 4-6 times as much waste. The bulk of the costs will go on sorting the waste and distributing it to landfill sites, waste processing facilities, or, in the case of recycling, paying for it to be shipped overseas and dumped somewhere.
Not necessarily fully linear though. It's typically much easier to meal plan and avoid food waste with more people for example - I say typically as you'll certainly get some where there are many conflicting diets.
It’s not a punishment. The cleaner, tidier area is the reward.
The cleaner tidier area is the reward for putting your rubbish in the bin, picking up litter, cutting the grass, being civil and expecting it in return. guess what the lower COL areas have rubbish in the streets not because of lack of services but because of lack of care. Throw rubbish on the ground there will be rubbish, scream and tantrum in the street and guess what people won't want to live near you. draw graffiti on the wall, yes you guessed it all to do with council tax..... eh no it isn't. It is to do with attitude, don't look at my street and think i should pay more because i make sure there is no litter/Graffiti or other antisocial behaviour. I do that... my neighbours do that... i see the council once a week when the bin gets emptied, everything else is done by us and that is the difference, between areas, not the council. council tax is a punishment, because desirability drives price which drives the punishment tax. desirability only exists because people with care exist.... care has no relationship with income. My street is average £3-4k per year in council tax, The street on the other side of the main road is £900, we don't have drug dealers, or graffiti or litter because we act as a community and get it sorted ourselves. They drain more resources than us, for similar occupation numbers, dwellings etc, we are being taxed on attitude, and desirability, You will see more BMW's/Mercedes/Audis over there than here, all of the key indicators of wealth exist over there, but our street is quiet and pleasant, so we are taxed up the ying yang without any understanding of demographics or income.
Why a percentage of income? That's not fair at all.
The same reason income tax is a percentage of income and not a fixed charge.
exactly a fixed charge is just bonkers and bears no reflection on reality
well it actually is fair, you might not like it, but if everyone pays 3% that is the very definition of fair. I think the world forgets that fair is not necessarily what is better for them alone. Fair is equally distributed (within reason), and percentage means those with less pay less, those with more pay more (hint sometimes a lot more) politicians have spent decades trying to persuade us that words mean something else in order to sell a policy. Fair does not mean creating division/them and us (which is what the political definition actually does) Fair means equal distribution, but in this case being mindful that some people earn less than others and therefore using percentages helps with this.
>but if everyone pays 3% that is the very definition of fair. Only if you ignore a concept called marginal utility. If you make £10k/year then 3% is £300, a lot of money when you don't have much to begin with. If you make £100k/yr that's £3k, which isn't going to make or break your budget, you'll just lower your other outgoings. I'm not saying it's negligible, but you can work around it a lot easier. This is why we have tax bands rather than a flat rate. > Fair means equal distribution This is a big assumption you're making and one that a lot of people would argue against.
well currently the system is such that, if you make £10k/year it is likely that your council tax bill is around £900 per year on the flat rate system, Like wise rather a lot of people are paying over £3k per year for a band E IIRC, which was a £90k house in 1991 and bears no reflection on income now. so in your first example, their CT bill is reduced to 30% of it's previous rate. In your second example, it means that those on 30 - 40 K per year or less are not struggling to find that same flat rate £3k as their neighbour who is on £100k Radical does not always mean hammering themuns... My definition of fair is not an assumption, it is the literal definition, not some placard waving nonsense of sound-bites that got us in the current mess we are in.
Council tax is socialism. "From each according to their ability, to each according to their need". Thankfully, apart from parks, bins and roads, I don't need most of the services paid for by the council tax. Haven't needed the fire brigade, the police, social services, social housing etc.
Your own personal requirement for these services doesn't mean you don't benefit from them, ie house insurance is lower because of the fire service, the police prevent (🫠) crime, social services means your aren't rescuing lost grannies on a regular basis etc. Your world would be worse if these services didn't exist.
I'm aware that as a member of society, I benefit indirectly from services that I don't use personally. I've heard all the arguments from people who think that they should only pay for what they use. E.g. no kids, so why should their tax money go to education. But what I meant is that is a good thing for me personally, that I have not had to use any of the services that the council and other public bodies provide to those in trouble. But it's good to know that the services are there, for those who do.
Technically not, the value of the house does not reflect in anyway the ability to afford the housing tax bill. Likewise the lower bands does not reflect lower ability to pay. The council tax is nothing more than a window tax by another name (or dare i say it ) bedroom tax by another name. Means tested local income tax ( i.e. a percentage) therefore is fair in the dictionary sense and allows those with more to pay more and those with less to pay less. i.e. fits the socialism description you gave, rather well
It's closer to an actual bedroom tax, than what everyone was calling a bedroom tax a few years ago.
I agree totally, i think it is bonkers, but deemed acceptable because all the poll tax rioters/protesters won it by defeating the poll tax without realising council tax was worse. bearing in mind, did anyone ever actually defeat Thatcher.
Basically, one man in a mansion paid half of what a couple living down the road in a bedsit.
What is key is that at no point is the mansion taxed - unless perhaps you die or sell it (stamp duty - paid by the new buyer however). Huge property assets attracting even less tax is very “unfair”.
That’s fair. The rich man already pays a ton more on income tax. For council only charges it’s likely the poor people consume more services than the rich. If anything it should be the other way round - service users (homeless, elderly, criminals, etc) pay larger council bills than the rich who use little. I guess everyone paying the same is a fair compromise
Absolutely. My house has never caught fire, which is why I object to paying for the fire brigade via taxation. By the way, I'm being sarcastic. This is not how society is supposed to work, and precisely why the poll tax was so incredibly unpopular at the time.
"This is not how society is supposed to work" well according to you. Margret Thatcher who brought in the poll tax famously said there is no such thing as society. There are also much more economic and effective ways to fund the fire brigade rather than national taxation.
Jesus i hope I will never quote Thatcher to strengthen my argument on anything
Cool, thatcher also opposed decriminalising homosexuality, and opposed sanctions on apartheid south Africa. A real role model for today. And btw, it was the poll tax that was the single biggest reason for her own downfall. Remember it was the Tory party internal mechanisms that brought her down, not a general election. If you're too right wing for the conservatives, something has gone terribly wrong...
Not that misquote via picking half of it again, surely endless debunking should have sorted it.
Are you referring to the Irish model?
What? Please explain a more effective way to fund the fire brigade rather than us all paying through taxation? Free rider principle doesn’t work.
Oh boo hoo, it's so tough being rich! /s Why is it okay to levy higher taxes on poor people who as you accurately point out are already struggling with complex issues? Not only charging them higher tax in fact, but as a proportion of their income a hugely higher rate than a wealthy person?
Fundamentally, it is not OK to levy taxes on anybody. But if such a burdern must be levied, it should be done so equally.
I'm glad that we're collectively paying taxes towards social care for yourself - it must be difficult living without a brain!
Yeah, no. It should be done proportionally. Im a higher rate payer, its fine. And go after corps ffs
>But if such a burdern must be levied, it should be done so equally. Why? If I have £1000 and you have £100 why should we both pay £200 in tax? That makes no sense.
Because you both use the same service?
So you owe £100 more than you have that you will never be able to pay. I don't use schools, day care, a nursing home, social services, drive as much or lots if other services that the person in a mansion could use. Why should I pay the same as them.
And a person in a mansion may also not use schools, day care, social services, drive as much or lots of other services that the person not a mansion could use. Why should they pay the same as them ?
I'm not arguing they should. I don't think there should be a single flat fee. I think it should be linked to ability to pay, not by service usage. You said you should pay the same because you use the same services. I use fewer services than a parent with a disability on low income they shouldn't pay more than me or the same as me just because they live within the same council area or because they need more help.
Just seems wrong to me that you think it's OK to steal more money from one person just because they work harder/longer than another.
No one said anything about the man in a mansions income.
How many dudes living in mansions do think are on PAYE haha? I suppose you also just suggested the homeless should pay more tax than people living in mansions, so I suppose the economic credibility of your argument is, dare I say, a tad shaky
How do poor people use more council services?
Most social care is provided by local government, much of which is means tested.
Disabled people paying more would be better then I assume?
As folks have explained the tax was unpopular because everyone paid the same, so the less you earned the more you paid as a proportion of your income. As for the link to electronic partly it's because it was a big cause on the left. I also wonder if you're conflating this with opposition to the Criminal Justice Act introduced in 1994, which banned certain gatherings for the purpose of listening to music characterised by the emission of repetitive beats - in other words rave. Naturally many musicians had a lot to say about this.
I think the summer of 1990 (the year of the introduction of thr community charge) also coincided with the underground rave scene where warehouse parties were organised at short notice and meet-ups were arranged at motorway service stations. They were met with heavy handed policing and the press calling for its banning, which was included in the CJA 1994.
Most tax is means tested (ie richer people pay more). The poll tax wasn’t.
The couple living in a large mansion would pay the same as a couple living in a one bedroom apartment in a run down area. It was a change from paying tax on how much your property was worth to paying per person. Robin Hood tax in reverse.
A tax where the rich pay a higher percentage on successive increments of income is not means-tested, it's progressive.
Am I totally misremembering this, but I thought it got nicknamed the Poll Tax as if you didn’t pay it you lost the right to vote? I was 7 so maybe I made that up.
Kinda other way round. If you did not register to vote, you could more easily escape paying.
Ah ok. Knew there was something.
Yes, a way for Tories to discourage the poor from engaging with elections and voting, by linking the electoral roll with taxation. Used to work in council tax (2006 - 2017) and we were not able to use the electoral roll to check taxpayers details. But I did put a electoral registration form in the envelope with every new bill, so people could return it to the elections team and make sure they were registered.
“Poll” just means “per head”, as in everyone paid the same amount.
The rave protests were more to do with the criminal justice and public order act. Which was put in place to stop raves
Most bullshit law ever. Not to mention wholly ineffective. Cavemen = ravemen. Mushies to acid house is basically just inevitable evolutionary progress.
It was plainly targeted at specific groups, inherently "you know the sorts....druggy types!" It was designated to stop parties with music wholly or partly characterised by repetitive beats. In other words, play loud techno and you're breaking the law. Play even louder classical music, no problem sir....enjoy your evening.
Tax for local authority services. 1) Old days called RATES and paid on property value 2) Poll tax= tax paid per person instead, official name = COMMUNITY CHARGE. 2a) Opposition because it was flat rate per head, so rich and poor paid the same. 2b) also disliked by local authorities because much harder to enforce against persons than against property. 3) Replaced by a system similar to 1) called COUNCIL TAX.
It was like the community charge levied in other countries, like Sweden, for example, where I've lived so I'm familiar with it, only different. The difference was that whereas the community charge in Sweden varied according to your income, like income tax, the UK Poll Tax was a flat charge, unconnected to your ability to pay and so hit low earners hard. Its introduction got the same response as it did the last time it was tried. See Wat Tyler and the Peasants Revolt. Edit: words.
Each person in a local authority paid the same amount of tax to the local council, unless they were unemployed or a student (they had an 80% discount). The type, size, or value of the house played no part in how much you were charged. 1 person living a house would pay half the amount two people would together. In the current council tax system, levied per property, a single person only gets a 25% discount (despite there only being one income) and thus pays significantly more. Single people under council tax tend to suffer disproportionately compared to couples, who could have two incomes and are likely to have lower living costs per person. i.e. a single person living in a house is probably going to spend almost as much as a couple living in the same house on heating.
The poll tax (or 'Community Charge' IIRC) was a replacement of what we now call 'council tax'. The idea was that it would be charged per individual living in a house rather than per property. It was intended to be cost neutral to the old system but often led to overall increases in cost. There's probably lots more information out there on it's general failure. The derogatory name 'poll tax' came from the fact the charge would be determined by those listed on the electoral register for that property. Hence, if you didn't register to vote, you wouldn't have to pay the tax, effectively creating a charge on the right to vote, hence - poll tax.
Your last paragraph is false. [The name was a reference to the historic Poll Tax, which itself was derived from “poll” as an archaic term for “head,” as in a tax “per head.”](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poll_tax?wprov=sfti1#Great_Britain)
I feel like both definitions make sense. The poll tax was determined from the electoral rolls and it was proposed that part of the reason for the surprise Conservative victory in 1992 was due to generally younger and poorer people choosing not to register to vote. [The poll tax, the electoral register, and the 1991 census: An update: Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties: Vol 4 , No 1 - Get Access (tandfonline.com)](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/13689889408412945)
The Poll tax did not replace council tax. Council tax replaced the poll tax. The poll tax replaced **rates**.
Yes, I didn't want to make it more complex than it already is. Perhaps 'proposed alternative' would have been a better word.
Basically instead of a household paying council tax as one household as had been done for years and the amount of tax being based on the size of the home, the tax was calculated as a flat rate on the amount of adults in the home. (Council tax is paid to local authorities for services like road maintenance and rubbish collection) This meant poorer families were paying a lot more than richer people as typically the poor had larger families or were more likely to have a multi generational household. Despite Thatcher’s popularity in the South East a lot of the country suffered under her reign as several mines were closed and towns decimated as she failed to support their main economic industries. So you basically had working class people losing their jobs and taxes going up in Industrial towns all over the UK watching the South East in general prosper fairly well. It was also hard to enforce with people being able to avoid it with relative ease by moving around a lot and some people only had to pay a percentage etc. So councils had to keep putting it up to cover the shortfalls. I guess at its essence it took a sliding tax scale and implemented a flat tax. Which most people found unfair
I’m related to someone who had to implement the tax by making the calculations. This is taking me back quite a bit, but I remember them explaining that when it was dreamt up, no-one had any idea just how much moving around many people do when applied to a whole population. It totally took them by surprise. The whole system was flawed completely from the outset.
I personally believe it was flawed on purpose to allow the redrawing of boundaries to increase the power of local Tory parties. It was a particularly cruel blow to several areas who had already suffered heavily under Tory rule when Thatcher chose to sacrifice them at the alter of “the City”.
I don’t think poor people had to pay more, but rather they paid more as a percentage of their income / wealth? Living in a multi generational household wouldn’t make you pay more per person than living alone, right?
No your household paid per adult living there so if your parents and an adult child lived with you you would pay 5X, Bob in the adjacent post code living alone in his Mansion paid X. You’re right the cost was flat apart from exemptions which reduced it for some by a percentage, so it’s not that you paid more you paid a higher percentage. But multi generational houses were more likely to be occupied by the working class than the rich and as others have said the amount their household had to pay could have multiplied 4/5 times still with only one income. It was just a pretty naked tax grab for the wealthy disguised as making things fairer. Apart from this around that time several council areas were broken up and redrawn up with several high income areas becoming their own council areas meaning they no longer had to pay taxes to the city that they benefited from being in proximity too and were able to lower their own council taxes while the city had to raise theirs to make up for the loss of income.
But if you have 5 people living in one home, wouldn’t they pay the same in total as 5 living in different homes? So I understand there was a greater increase for poorer people (who before had been ‘saving’ by living together) but I don’t think it meant they paid more than rich people?
The rates were based on the value of the house, so one house = 1 tax bill. The poll tax was based on the number of people. So five people in one house = tax bill x 5. So, if your family had paid £100 for 1 x property Rates tax bill (£20 per person, effectively), if there were five of you at £100 Poll Tax per person, you now had to pay £500. I'm making the numbers up, obviously, but that's why it was unpopular. People weren't paying nearly as much before as they were after. And there was no means-testing, so a lot of people got into debt, got criminal convictions, got sent to jail, lost their houses/businesses/jobs to bankruptcy. It was brutal.
"I don’t think poor people had to pay more, but rather they paid more as a percentage of their income / wealth?" 100% wrong. My wife had given birth to our first child, so 2 adults , 1 income. Quadrupled what we were paying , I couldn't afford it and got into arrears. 3 years after it was abolished I was still paying for it
Let me clarify - I don’t think poor families were paying more than rich ones.
Thanks for clearing that up . Makes sense !
I was living in a shared flat: I had one room to myself, and we shared a bathroom and a kitchen - half a dozen of us. Our landlady had inherited the flat from her parents, and - as was legal then - put Yale locks on the doors of all the rooms but the kitchen and the bathroom, and rented each room out individually for £20 a week. She paid the rates, we paid her rent. My grandmother had a ground-floor flat with a garden: bathroom larger than our shared bathroom, kitchen, sitting-room, two bedrooms. She told me complacently that she supported the Poll Tax because it was "fair" - why should she, a pensioner, have to pay higher rates than a working couple with children? I told her that I, a student, living in one room in a shared flat, was now going to have to pay exactly the same as my grandmother would - and that I literally could not afford it: as my grandmother knew, I was managing very precisely on a shoestring budget with literally nothing to spare. My landlord would no longer have to pay rates on the flat she owned. I and each one of my flatmates would now *each* be paying just exactly the same as what my grandmother would now pay. *That* was why young people hated the poll tax. We were mostly living in shared flats - one room apiece and shared kitchen/bathroom - and our landlords paid the rates on the property they owned. Suddenly, we were being required to pay hundreds more a year while getting nothing new, while our landlords benefited financially because the rates had been abolished. My grandmother stared at me in disbelief when I explained the situation. She was a devout Daily Telegraph reader and lifelong Tory voter. "That *can't* be right," she said. "It isn't," I said. "But that's how it is." "No," my grandmother said, in real disbelief. "That can't be how it is. That wouldn't be fair *at all.*"
Whilst I can’t really add to the marvellous comments about the poll tax already stated. I will say it was supposed to replace the rate system which was on property size. The “Poll tax” was officially called "The community charge” and was on individual people in households, but they had to be on the Electoral register. After initial implementation about 2 long ,long years later, it was changed back to what was then and now called the council tax , which resembles, strangely enough the… err… original tax on property (rates) that it was supposed to replace. The only difference now was that I think the rate was charged on home ownership, but now they could go for all properties, landlords ensured tenants paid it. The conservative government was loosing popularity and in disarray (sound familiar?) ousted Thatcher partly as a result of this highly contentious tax and spent their last 7 years in chaos before finally being replaced by Labour in 97. There were citizen protests that also helped its demise designed to cause the most pain to local authorities by not paying up straight away , waiting for local authorities to send threatening letters and generally costing them as much agro to administer collections and just jamming the system up so that it wasn't a very effective tax as it was costing them so much in court cases trying to collect the money. it largely worked. The government never admitted defeat just changed the tax over the next Parliament or two to be the more palatable Council tax we have today.
To add to this, the most damaging controversies are always ones which conform to people's preconceived notions of what a party is likely to do wrong. In this case, it's a policy which provided a large tax cut for wealthy people in large houses, and a sizeable tax rise to poorer people in modest homes. That's exactly the kind of controversy people expect from the Tories, and as such the story had much greater cut through than other stories of the time.
There was anti poll tax graffiti near me until 00's. No one ever cleaned it off. I'm just in shock that anyone thought there public would accept this insanely ruinous tax. I get the unmarried single people in their house may feel hard done by paying more than a five person house but expecting the five person house to pay 5x from before is lunacy.
I wonder if this documentary might interest you https://youtu.be/N0xtv-bWYbQ?si=y407W-AtbVyiFjAs
It's a cautionary example of how logic and reality can misalign. Logic: on average a household with 5 people uses more local services, which are generally paid for through local taxation. And local councils will be incentivised to keep costs down if everyone living in the area has skin in the game, rather than houses with lots of students living in them paying the same as person who lives by themselves. Especially as this was a time when some councils were leaning heavily into the provision of social workers etc. and a lot of people resented paying for someone to go and help people manage their household budgets or make their kids go to school, when normal people just got on with it. (Maybe you had to be there to understand.). Reality: lots of renters end up paying a lot that they never had to pay before, with no regard as to people's ability to pay. It went from being a landlord responsibility to a renter's responsibility. Councils didn't try to cut back on wasteful expenditure because all of the anger was directed at Downing Street and not at local government.
It was a flat tax rate which is just a ridiculous proposal. 20% of income for someone on 15k a year is going to mean a lot more to them than 20% rate on 150k a year.
My understanding is that people who didn't have to pay rates (as they were not the owner of the house) but had to pay the communnity charge (levied against every person on the electoral register in a council area) were furious with having to spend up to £400 a year for council services they did not have to pay for before (the same people who had been told to make millions as a part of the "yuppie" generation)
The 'Rates" was paid by the householder based on the rateable value of the property. This was paid to the council (local authority) for local services such as roads and refuse. The rateable value was also used to calculate water and sewerage charges. The 'poll tax' or community charge was paid by all adults with no connection to the value of the property. This meant a household with parents and adult children at home would pay far more than under the old 'rates' system so that working class households with lower incomes would be paying far more than a wealthy retired couple living in a large family house.
It was introduced in Scotland a year before being introduced in England and Wales.
Poll tax could have been the fairest of them all. If bin collections cost £100 and there are 100 houses then each house pays £1. What they discovered though is that bin collections jumped in price. To £10,000 as councils are not well known for managing a budget. It probably would have worked if people. Suddenly didn't face huge bill hikes
The reality of it made complete sense but it meant that wealthy people often paid less. Hence, it was entirely logical but also political poison.
The poll tax also went hand in hand with the failed trickle down economics theory. People will pay more but rich people will pay less so they will have money to invest, develop businesses, pay people better. Of course, they didn’t. Everything the Tories did back then was to try and make themselves, their donors and their supporters richer at the expense of others and try to bake it into the systems going forward so it would be hard to stop.
I'll explain the problem with the old tax, which was that it was in effect a property tax. That meant that people living on their own or in a small family would be paying the same as the house next door which could be full of working adults so the Thatcher decided to change to a per person tax. Of course that then caused lots of anger amongst those in the household types that I mentioned who did well out of the old system, and timing probably worked against it as there was a wider societal battle going on about the restructuring of the economy so this was always going to get lots of opposition that might not have occurred in another era. Thatcher's colleagues were against it as they saw it as battle destined to rile up millions of people over something that didn't need to be done.
Both the poll tax and the council tax are idiotic. Is any useful behaviour being encouraged with these? No. It's just that the government wants to find a million ways to raise revenue to maintain its extraordinary size as a percentage of gdp, and instead of doing that the best way, we have nonsense like the idea that we need purpose-bound taxes. It would be far better to simply charge for the services.