Council tax re-band have I been stitched up?

Bri1

A number of months ago after getting the info from here, my council tax was re-banded from a D to a C with a refund attached, all well & good.

A few months ago we realised that we were given the wrong threshold information for Housing benefit upon our council tax, which we also had to go to an official court appeal to get the 6 month backdate, after winning our appeal at the hearing, the council bloke was not very happy as the judge said they were completely wrong & they should have paid out in the first place, we heard nothing about the backdate being paid, so we chased it up & finally got the couple of hundred pounds credited back to our account, but we never received a letter confirming that we had won at the hearing from the Council or that we would be getting any money back.

Then mysteriously after coming back off holiday a couple of weeks later we got a letter saying that the Council had made a mistake on the re-banding & would be putting it back up to a band D as before, they claim that they have looked at their house value information & decided that we should be back in band D from November, this was the same information that they used when we appealed against the band and won in the first place.

Does anyone think that there is a connection going on here after losing their appeal with the backdating mentioned above or is this just a co-incidence, as it seems a bit suspect to me as this letter came only about three weeks after we finally got the measly backdate on our Council tax account after asking a couple of times following the successful backdate appeal?

As I am disabled and am sick of having to fight for everything I get, is it worth going through all the stress of trying to appeal this banding again as it was a real slog before?

System

Council tax bands are set by the Valuation Office Agency who are :

The Valuation Office Agency is an executive agency of HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC). We provide the Government with the valuations and property advice required to support taxation and benefits. We also deliver a range of statutory and non-statutory valuation and surveying services to over 4,000 public sector bodies.

Hence, it is not the council who set the band, if the letter you received after your return from holiday is from the council, then check with the VOA to confirm which band has been set.

See : http://www.voa.gov.uk/corporate/index.html

lincroft1710

See my reply to your other thread.