27 September 2010
A council tax revaluation would be costly and is ‘not a priority’, the local government minister has told Public Finance.
Bob Neill was speaking to PF after the government announced that there would be no revaluation in England during the current Parliament. He said the exercise would cost £180m and was not at the top of ministers’ agendas. It is ‘not a priority given the deficit left by the previous government’, he added.
Neill said that ‘although there may have been changes in values, all the evidence suggests that the relationship from one band to another remains the same’.
He denied that the move contradicted the coalition’s approach to localism, nor did it make a nonsense of next year’s review of local government finance. ‘I think it’s sensible to look at everything across the piece rather than look at one bit of the equation in isolation to everything else,’ he said.
Friday’s announcement prompted claims that the local levy was becoming irrelevant because a valuation had not taken place since 1991.
Tony Travers, director of the Greater London Group at the London School of Economics, said the announcement was evidence that there probably never would be revaluation, eventually ‘discrediting’ council tax altogether.
CIPFA chief executive Steve Freer said having revaluations of council tax from time to time was ‘part of its proper maintenance’. He told PF that successive postponements by governments raised the question as to whether evaluations ‘have to be mandatory and not matters that should be left to the government of the day’.
Writing on the PFblog, Freer said: ‘If we are to avoid steering the council tax on to the rocks, an important question looms large. How do we get to regular revaluations?’ He suggested that fixed-term revaluations or a continual updating of the tax base were two options that might work.
