Challenging Council Tax Banding

Zammo76

I'm in the process of appealing my Council Tax banding. And have just received a nasty threatening letter from the Council Tax banding douchbags saying that they arn't willing to change my banding and are now looking at properties in my street (which I bought to their attention) as they think they need to increase their bandings to. However my property has been apparently valued by them as being worth between £120,000 to £160,000 in 1991, despite the fact it sold in 1996 for £110,000, which I pointed out to them.

The only thing I think which could be altering the valuation in the Council Tax blokes eyes is that the property has had a single story extension (probably around 2008). So my question is: Is the 1991 valuation of the property based on the property as it was in that years sale price or the property as it was now (with a single story extension) price in 1991?

Either way I really don't think a single story extension would have raised the value of the property by enough to push it to more than £120,000 in 1991's house prices.

p00hsticks

House prices did actually fall in the first half of the 1990's, so it's perfectly possibly that a house valued at £120,000 in 1991 only sold for £110,000 in 1996.

https://tradingeconomics.com/united-kingdom/housing-index

As you can only guess at the date, it sounds like it was a previous owner who added the extension. When some major work like that is carried out, a marker is added to the council tax register to indicate that the property needs to be revalued to take account of the improvement / increased size when it next changes hands.

https://www.gov.uk/guidance/council-tax-band-changes

Presunably this happened when you or a previous owner bought it and it may or may not have resulted in it being pushed up a band.

Zammo76

The trouble is records don't go back as far as 1991, so its all hypothetical. I find it very convenient that the government has chosen a date where they know people can't go back to and check.

antrobus

Zammo76 wrote: »

The trouble is records don't go back as far as 1991, so its all hypothetical. I find it very convenient that the government has chosen a date where they know people can't go back to and check.

I think it's more to do with the fact that CT was introduced by the Local Government Finance Act 1992. Valuing properties as at April 1991 would have been just, err, common sense.

Subsequent governments (there have been a number of them) have shied away from going for a revaluation for fear of upsetting at least some of the voters. So 1991 remains the magic year.

Apart from Wales, of course.

But this isn't some dark conspiracy to part people from their money. The amount of CT a council wishes to raise is a fixed amount, bandings simply determine how that is distributed.

p00hsticks

Zammo76 wrote: »

The trouble is records don't go back as far as 1991, so its all hypothetical. I find it very convenient that the government has chosen a date where they know people can't go back to and check.

You need to bear in mind that - as antrobus says above - the tax was introduced back in 1992 and so the valuation date at the time was very recent.

There's every chance that (assuming the property actually existed at the time) that the owner at the time would have challenged the banding if they thought there was a chance they could get it reduced.

It was a very hot topic at the time (bearing in mind that the tax was a replacement for the extremely contentious community charge (aka 'poll tax'), and as far as I can recall when the bandings were first announced details of how to challenge them were included with the initial bill (I know I successfully got the property I was living in at the time reduced by a band).