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Back at the start of the 1990s, shortly after the Poll Tax debacle, the Conservative government decided that it would introduce a form of taxation that was nearly as unpopular. That form of taxation was known as Council Tax and it remains a bone of contention twenty years later.
Council Tax does, however, offer the opportunity for you to potentially save yourself a little bit of money, although your circumstances do have to be quite precise. Back in 1992/3 the government sent out pairs of estate agents around the country to assign houses to price bands for the Council Tax. The system that they used was objective in the extreme, in fact, most of the time these estate agents didn’t even bother to get out of their cars.
Accordingly, thousands, if not tens of thousands of houses were placed into the wrong category, and if your house was one of them you can claim a rebate backdated as far as 1993.
The method for doing this is very simple, just as there are mortgage calculators (give Santander’s mortgage calculator a look for a good example) all over the internet so there are house price calculators which can work out how much your house should have cost in 1993 when you input a modern valuation.
If the value falls into a lower band that the one you are currently in, then you can claim the backdated rebate.
However, there are some considerations. Firstly, if your house has been sold since 1993 then it will have been reassessed for Council Tax and put into the right banding, whilst there is the chance that this banding was wrong, in 99 out of 100 cases it will prove to be accurate.
Secondly, just because you’re in the wrong band doesn’t mean that you’re going to save money, you might have been assessed into a lower band than the accurate one, in which case, challenging your Council Tax banding would be a very bad move indeed.
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