Council Tax, empty to second home to single person

jamesd

I have two properties, one I own, one I rent. Injury prevented me from moving from the rental to the owned one. They are in the same street and council area. The current state is:

1. Rental, live in full time, single person discount.
2. Owner, empty and unfurnished, paying premium. Refurbishment work planned but habitable anyway. VAT discount as long term empty, certified by council empty properties team.

Ultimate plan is to move to property 2 full time after all refurbishment work and stop renting property 1.

A. What general guidance is there on when an empty and unfurnished place should be treated as a holiday or second home? The latter two have a lower Council Tax rate so some reluctance from the council to transition trivially is understandable, yet second homes do legitimately exist and empty do legitimately transition to being home sometimes.

B. At what point during a staged move from one to the other, to provide a fallback option for medical reasons, does it become proper to change from second home to main home and switch the single person discount?

At present the council view appears to be that the only transition they will accept for property 2 is from vacant to primary, four plus days a week, residence. No second home period at all for that property even if it is slept in and otherwise used for some lesser time before a full move.

What guidance exists for these transitions? Good cites that I can use to avoid this becoming an area of disagreement between me and the council would be nice. Absolute minimisation of Council Tax isn't the main objective, finding a sensible and not unreasonable pair of transition states is

lincroft1710

I would suggest you read the other threads on this subject on this board and also on the Reclaim PPI and Other Insurance board.

elmer

In my LA the day your CT changes is the day after your first night in the place.

If you sleep there then thats where you claim the SPD, the other property will then be eligible for the relevant second home discount offered in your LA.

elmer

CIS

A)
There's no real difference - it's an unoccupied dwelling and will be treat as such - you could have 10 unoccupied dwellings and the same rules would generally apply to each of them.


As soon as you become 'solely or mainly' resident in the property you are liable - technically the circumstances at the end of the day define what has happened for that entire day but some local authorities may allow some lee-way.

jamesd

For A, it's not necessarily empty and unoccupied though it is and will be for a while longer until most of the refurbishment is done. It's not that hard to start using the property from time to time and there will be a time when I am sleeping some of the time in each place. Since this is the part that will cost the council money, it's this transition from unoccupied to limited occupation time - a second home - that will probably matter most to them and to me.

HappyMJ

Is there a bed and at least one chair and some cooking facilities? It would then be furnished. If it was just a blow up mattress you took with you in case working on site kept you late then it could be considered unfurnished.

As far as a second property is concerned where do you keep all your stuff? Paperwork for bills, insurance policies, passports, birth certificates, photos, etc...that sort of stuff would be at your primary residence. Where does your mail for your bank accounts get sent?

You could sleep in a property for example whilst working in central London 4 nights a week and return to your home in the country on the weekend sleeping for 3 nights and the one that you slept in 3 nights could be your primary residence.

jamesd

There are cooking facilities but no bed and no chair. At any time I could change that but at the moment that will lose me the reduced VAT rate so I won't do it yet.

Once the majority of the refurbishment is done that consideration will no longer apply and it will be sensible to start using the place some of the time, in part to establish whether it meets my physical limitations or not. Natural thing to do while working on the place.

At the moment everything is in the rental place and that is where mail is sent. Mail will change as soon as most of the refurbishment is done, before I am living in the new place full time. The new place is already where I would live if I was to lose my job.

The key cost/revenue issue is the transition of one place from empty and unfurnished to a second home and what threshold applies to that transition. The primary residence issue presumably has no revenue effect - one place will get a single person discount either way and I assume that the other would be a second home.