Challenging council tax band after home improvements

purple-dub

Hi all
I just read through the article about challenging your tax band with the intention of doing it today, but I'm not sure if I should proceed.

We bought our house in 1996, for £47,500, tax band C. However, equivalent properties in our street are band B, and the neighbouring properties which are also band C have much larger plots than ours, 3 or 4 times the size of ours.

I've checked the Nationwide calculator which puts our house in B for 1991, and I've checked against other properties in our street, so I think we pass the test *but* we had our loft converted some years ago, which shows on the gov.uk site as an improvement indicator,
I believe this means they can't put our tax band up, but they could if we sold the house.

Should I still challenge the banding, or does the loft conversion bump us up into C anyway? I definitely don't want to open a can of worms! 
Thanks 

lincroft1710

I'm ex VOA and my take on this was that if a CT payer asked for a band review, I would look at the property as it stood at the date of the request. My reasoning for this was that CT legislation only said the band could not be increased on account of alterations by the current CT payer.


However my reasoning may no longer be correct, so it may be worth asking for a band review, but concentrate on the comparison with the Band Bs in the street, the VOA rarely took plot size into account and the Nationwide (and others) calculator is inaccurate.

purple-dub

Thanks, just to be clear, you're saying you would take the added value of the loft conversion into consideration if you were looking at my review? 

lincroft1710

purple-dub said:

Thanks, just to be clear, you're saying you would take the added value of the loft conversion into consideration if you were looking at my review? 

I would have done had I been dealing with the case when I was in the VOA, but I am now not certain that that was the correct approach