Comment on UK ‘in violation of international law’ over poverty levels, says UN envoy
fakeman_pretendname@feddit.uk 7 months agoYou can also get Council Tax benefit, and Housing Benefit (more of a Landlord Benefit, really).
Council tax benefit saves you either some or all of the local council tax payment (~£1000 - £2500 in most places). Amusingly, it tends to be cheaper in wealthy areas.
Landlord benefit pays a percentage of what the Landlord asks for rent, generally compared to average rents in the area you live - so that might be £2000 - £3000 where I live in the North, but £10000 down South somewhere. You don’t see any of that money personally, but it helps to make good headlines for angry “newspapers” and government policies.
There’s additional bits of payment for caring for children under a particular age, disability etc, but generally, yeah, that’s your lot.
PsychedSy@sh.itjust.works 7 months ago
You guys have to pay over 1k pounds to your local towns?
smeg@feddit.uk 7 months ago
How much you pay is proportional to how much your property is worth (see Wikipedia for deets)
PsychedSy@sh.itjust.works 7 months ago
Okay, so like property taxes here. Gotcha. I was just interested in different methods of collecting funds there are.
tankplanker@lemmy.world 7 months ago
I wish we had a proper property tax here that was based on house and land value that was the same nationally. With the way council tax works richer areas, which almost always have more expensive houses and land, pay less annually than the same property in the cheaper area and yet their local council is better funded. A national system is the only way to reverse this.
smeg@feddit.uk 7 months ago
I don’t know where your property tax goes, but that might overlap with our Stamp Duty, which is basically our tax on buying a house and is a nationwide government thing. Council Tax I think goes to your local council and is used for things like bin collection, buses, potholes, and local community events (and it keeps going up because the Tories keep cutting the amount that councils get from the government).