Has anyone successfully challenged the council tax band of their property?

[MontyVeda]

Looking at buying a house and one thing i'm noticing is the council tax bands don't make a lot of a sense. A decent house in one area can be in band A whilst a less expensive/smaller house elsewhere is in band B.

I had a quick look on the .gov website and it appears that council tax bands are based on property valuations in 1991... which seems a bit out of date. There is an appeal process but has anyone gone down that route and were they successful?

 

[Venod]

We got ours reduced, we were a cul de sac of mostly 4 bed detached with one 5 bed detached, they extended the cul de sac with more 4 bed detached and one 3 bed bungalow, all the new houses were band D while ours was band E, I wrote to the council pointing out the discrepancy, and we got the reduction to D, I pointed this out to neighbors and they all succeeded in getting a reduction.

 

[Richard A Thackeray]

Ours got rebanded from a 'B', like the terraced houses to either side

However, ours & the next house are both semi's, so got banded to 'D'
(does the estimated price play a part)

I think wife has enquired

 

[Pat "5mph"]

We got ours reduced, we were a cul de sac of mostly 4 bed detached with one 5 bed detached, they extended the cul de sac with more 4 bed detached and one 3 bed bungalow, all the new houses were band C while ours was band D, I wrote to the council pointing out the discrepancy, and we got the reduction to C, I pointed this out to neighbours and they all succeeded in getting a reduction.

Similar here.
About 20 years ago a neighbour made us aware about other like for like properties in the same street having a lower council tax band.
Me and others successfully got our tax reduced.

 

[teeonethousand]

We got re banded from F to E after I googled all the other houses in our village and we were clearly out of line. They sent someone round and whilst she agreed with me she said maybe they should up the neighbours to align. Not funny. We got money back for a few years and the guy who lived in it from new got a years difference back too.

Worth a shot if you have a decent case.

 

[Dadam]

Well given we’ve always been in band A, no!

And I’ve not wanted to rock the boat

 

[steverob]

Because a lot of houses had to be valued in a very short space of time in the 90's as they were desperate to get rid of the Poll Tax, a lot of the valuations were done on a drive-by basis, or by valuing one house on a road and assuming the rest were all the same, meaning there were quite a few discrepancies.

We've actually benefited from ours as we have a different (lower) banding than the neighbour we share a wall with (semi-detached house) because their address is Something Road, whereas ours is Something Close as we're right on the corner of the two roads. And as Something Road is mainly 3 bed semis, whereas the Close is all 2 bed terraces except ours, I guess we got the lower rating because we were lumped in with the rest of the Close houses even though our property is the same size as our neighbour.

We could tell them and let them get the same banding as us, but we have heard that it is definitely possible for it to work the wrong way round - they might stay on the same band and we get bumped up instead, so we're keeping shtum.

 

[presta]

I got mine re-banded from D to C.

I had the advantage that it had recently been valued for probate when I inherited it in June 1988, so I went and looked up house price inflation for the period 1988-1991 in the Inland Revenue Valuation Office statistics in the library, then fed the District Valuer his own data. I had the choice of inflating the house value using national data for semi detached housing, or local data for all types of housing, and chose whichever was most favourable to them. If I'd done it the other way I could made a good case for downgrading it to Band B, but I didn't want to blow my chances by looking greedy.

In the event, they agreed without question or quibble, but I hadn't really left them a leg to stand on, especially as the estate agent's original valuation in 1988 had been reviewed and revised by the Revenue in the first place.

Many years later I was chatting with an old lady two doors up the road from me, and I told her this when she grumbled about council tax in passing, so she had a go at it too. She didn't just get a re-band, she also got a lump sum refund of several (six?) years excess tax as well.

 

[Electric_Andy]

Looking at buying a house and one thing i'm noticing is the council tax bands don't make a lot of a sense. A decent house in one area can be in band A whilst a less expensive/smaller house elsewhere is in band B.

I had a quick look on the .gov website and it appears that council tax bands are based on property valuations in 1991... which seems a bit out of date. There is an appeal process but has anyone gone down that route and were they successful?

Yes, my Dad did last year and got a £40,000 rebate because they'd been paying too much ever since they moved there in 1970

 

[Electric_Andy]

Yes, my Dad did last year and got a £40,000 rebate because they'd been paying too much ever since they moved there in 1970

I might add, he used a company who took 20%, so didn't do it directly, but it was worth it to him

 

[colly]

40 years ago when we moved into another place we got our new house moved from one band to another simply by citing other houses in a lower band. As I recall it was easy to do.

 

[T4tomo]

Yes, my Dad did last year and got a £40,000 rebate because they'd been paying too much ever since they moved there in 1970

I'm not sure we had council tax in 1970 - it was domestic rates back in the day wasn't it and briefly Poll Tax / community charge (I predict a riot) then the current council tax

 

[Willd]

I did in 1998, ours was a C, but talking to a neighbour up the street theirs was a B. So it's been a B since (although we had a 2 storey extension added in 2012)..

 

[Drago]

Challenges twice, succeeded once.