In recent years, there has been renewed interest in the question of whether additional taxes should be devolved to English local government. The past decade has seen a number of changes to how local government is funded, including the introduction of business rates retention. Broadly, these...

Council tax matters. It matters to local government as, at over £31 billion a year, it now makes up over half of its funding for non-education expenditure. It matters for households, for whom the bills take up an average of over 3% of their income. And it matters to central government, which is...

In April 2013, council tax benefit (CTB), which provided help for low-income households with their council tax, was abolished. In its place, local authorities (LAs) in England were charged with designing their own council tax support (CTS) schemes for those of working age - though they were...

Council tax benefit (CTB) was abolished in April 2013 and local authorities in England were charged with designing their own council tax support (CTS) schemes in its place. Although these must maintain support for pensioners at its previous level, local authorities have had wide discretion to...

The national non-domestic rate was introduced in 1990 to replace a system of locally varying business rates which had lasted for almost four centuries. Five years after the. 1990 reforms, this report evaluates the operation of the present system and discusses various options for reform.

Council tax bands in Wales are based on property values in April 2003 - 17 years ago. That is more up to date than in England and Scotland, where they are based on values in April 1991 (almost 30 years ago!). But it is still enough time for the relative values of different properties to change...

The Scottish Government's Budget for 2024-25 takes place at a time of particular uncertainty about the future funding environment. UK government spending plans both for the coming year and for later years seem likely to be topped up, but when and by how much is unclear. The current UK government...