EVERY local authority in Britain will put Council Tax up by 5%, Treasury sources admit as average bills top £2,000 for the first time following Hunt’s budget that also sees SIX MILLION workers dragged into higher income tax brackets
- Chancellor Jeremy Hunt yesterday announced he would be ending decade-long cap on council tax increases
- Almost every local authority in England expected to take advantage of new powers to raise council tax further
- The five per cent rise would push the average amount of council tax paid on a Band D home beyond £2,000
- Meanwhile, more than six million dragged deeper into the tax system as a result of swathe of stealth tax rises
- Around 15% of adults will be paying higher rate of income tax by 2028, compared with six per cent in 2010
Every local authority in Britain is expected to raise council tax by five per cent, a Treasure source has admitted, as the average family faces bills topping £2,000 for the first time following Jeremy Hunt’s Autumn Budget.
The Chancellor yesterday announced he would be ending a decade-long cap on council tax increases to allow town halls to impose the rise without the need to hold a referendum.
Almost every local authority in England is expected to take advantage of the new powers without residents having to vote for it, tipping average bills over £2,000 .
The five per cent rise would increase the average amount of council tax paid on a Band D home by £98.30 – pushing the mean from £1,966 to £2,064.30 nationwide.
The budget watchdog, meanwhile, has estimated bills will now rise by an average of 5 per cent for each of the next five years, raking in an extra £4.8billion a year.
Meanwhile, more than six million workers in the UK are being dragged deeper into the tax system as a result of the swathe of stealth tax rises announced by Mr Hunt.
The Chancellor is extending the freeze on income tax thresholds and allowances for two years. This means even middle earners now face paying the 40p rate of tax.
Documents issued by the OBR yesterday showed that the six-year freeze would result in 3.2million new income taxpayers, while a further 2.6million would be pulled into the higher tax bracket, The Times reports.
Fifteen per cent of adults will be paying a higher rate of income tax by 2028, compared with just six per cent when the Tories returned to power in 2010.
But he will still hammer higher earners after reducing the income level at which the top 45p rate kicks in from £150,000 to £125,000, dragging hundreds of thousands more people into the tax bracket.
The Chancellor yesterday announced he would be ending a decade-long cap on council tax increases to allow town halls to impose the increase without the need to hold a referendum
Extending the freeze on tax thresholds to 2028 will drag all workers deeper in the system, meaning they pay more
Tax thresholds freeze
The ultimate stealth tax will rake in billions as a four-year freeze on income tax and national insurance allowances and thresholds is extended to six years. The basic rate threshold will stay at £12,571 until 2028, while the starting point for 40p tax will be held at £50,271.
45p tax
The threshold for the top rate of tax is being lowered from £150,000 to £125,000, which could drag around 250,000 high earners into the top rate for the first time.
Energy bills
Liz Truss’s energy price ‘guarantee’ to cap average bills at £2,500 for two years will now be raised to around £3,000 from April. A universal one-off payment of £400 this winter will not be repeated, meaning millions will be an average of £900 worse off.
Cornwall Insights estimates that without government help the level would rise to £4,245.
Windfall tax
The 25 per cent levy introduced on oil and gas profits this year is being increased to 35 per cent and extended until March 2028.
That means firms will face a 65 per cent to 75 per cent charge on profits from UK operations.
There will also be a 40 per cent tax on profits of older renewable and nuclear electricity generation, together raising around £14billion next year.
Spending
Mr Hunt announced public spending cuts totalling £30billion. Some capital projects face curbs, such as prison building.
Social care
The Chancellor delayed the flagship cap on social care costs by two years, with officials predicting it will save £1billion next year.
Pensions and benefits
The Chancellor said from April pensions and benefits will rise in line with the September inflation figure of 10.1 per cent, which will see the new state pension rise by £18.70 to £203.85 a week.
Cost of living payments for vulnerable
The Government will introduce additional cost-of-living payments for the ‘most vulnerable’, with £900 for those on benefits, £300 for pensioners and £150 for those on a disability benefit.
Motoring
Electric vehicles are set to be charged vehicle excise duty for the first time.
Foreign aid
Mr Hunt said the reduction in the UK’s international development spending from 0.7 per cent to 0.5 per cent of national income will stay in place for longer, potentially another five years.
Council tax hike
The decade-long cap on council tax increases is being lifted so town halls can impose 5 per cent without holding a referendum. It could put £100 on an average Band D bill.
While income tax rates have not changed – they remain 20p basic, 40p higher and 45p additional rate – it is the impact of inflation on the threshold where they kick in that will rake in billions for the Treasury.
Currently workers earning between £12,570 and £50,270 pay the basic rate of income tax. But wage inflation is running at 6 per cent, according to figures released by the Office for National Statistics this week.
This means that as wages rise to deal with increases in living costs – CPI inflation is currently at 11.1 per cent – more middle income workers will be dragged into the 40p rate bracket, increasing their bills.
The tax thresholds had already been frozen until 2026, but Mr Hunt extended this until 2028 – by which time three million people will have been brought into the tax system for the first time, and an additional 2.6million will be in the higher rate.
The move is set to cost someone on £50,000 an extra £1,893 a year by the time the freeze comes to an end.
Mr Hunt also confirmed widely briefed plans to increase the tax bills of the highest earners, to make the Statement seem fairer.
But he last night admitted that ‘living standards are going down’.
‘That is the uncomfortable situation facing us and countries like Germany, who are seeing their growth forecasts go down by even more than us,’ the Chancellor told broadcasters.
He also insisted that ‘governments can’t do everything’ to protect peoples’ incomes.
The tax burden will go from 33.1 per cent of GDP in 2019-20 to 37.1 per cent in 2027-28 – a percentage point higher than forecast in March and its ‘highest sustained level since the Second World War’.
Tax receipts are set to top £1trillion for the first time this year, rather than next as had been anticipated, largely due to the windfall tax.
A Treasury distributional analysis indicated that by next year all single-adult households earning more than £25,000 will be worse off from the measures announced today, while for families of four the figure was £59,000.
in his Commons statement, Mr Hunt said taking ‘difficult decisions’ would mean a ‘shallower downturn’. However, he immediately faced questions about his plans as it emerged that the vast bulk of the £24billion tax increases and £30billion in spending cuts will not be felt until after the next election, expected in 2024.
Spending is actually set to increase by £9.5billion in 2023-24, while only £7.4billion extra will have been raised from taxes.
Meanwhile, the Chancellor only made a single reference to his council tax reforms yesterday, saying that funding for elderly care would increase due to ‘more council tax flexibilities’.
But Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves accused him of ‘forcing local council to put up council tax’.
She added: ‘Local people, including those with Conservative councils, will be forced to pay more because of the destruction that the Tories have wreaked on our economy.
‘And this at a time when councils are already in dire straits because of a lack of support from central government.’
‘They probably sat around their table in Downing Street thinking this was some clever trick: make the councils take the blame.
‘But no one is to blame for this except the government that’s been in power for 12 years.’
Local authorities have warned that the council tax increase will be ‘extremely difficult’ for struggling families to absorb, The Times reports.
Surrey County Council leader Tim Oliver told the newspaper that ‘some county leaders may be reluctant’ to impose the rise ‘during a cost of living crisis, considering ratepayers in county areas currently pay the highest bills on average’.
Unleashing a wave of tax changes in an extraordinary Autumn Statement yesterday, Mr Hunt warned the country must make ‘sacrifices’ to weather turmoil at home and abroad while insisting the emergency response would be ‘compassionate’.
But Britons now face the highest tax burden since the Second World War, with all workers facing having to pay more in tax as a freeze on the personal allowance, basic and higher thresholds is extended to 2028.
The Chancellor only made a single reference to his council tax reforms yesterday, saying that funding for elderly care would increase due to ‘more council tax flexibilities’
Council tax explained
How your council tax band is worked out
There are eight council tax bands, each with a different rate of council tax.
They are based on the value of the property you live in, as assigned by the Valuation Office Agency, part of HMRC.
They are worked out based on what a home might have sold for in April 1991.
Even if the property was built recently, its band is based on an estimation of what its value would have been in 1991.
In England the bands range from A to H, with A being the cheapest and H the most expensive.
How to find out your council tax band
The Government has a website where you can check you council tax band.
You can do so by clicking here.
This also allows you to challenge your council tax band if you think your home is in the wrong bracket.
The raft of changes have left the average family facing the prospect of being more than £800 a year worse off, while the Chancellor has also confirmed that help with soaring energy bills is due to be reigned in – with the typical household bill rising from £2,500 to £3,000 from April..
It has also left households facing the worst falls in living standards since records began in 1956, wiping out eight years of progress with unemployment surging from 1.2million to 1.7m.
The Chancellor also used his autumn statement to announce help with energy costs has been extended for all households, but at a less generous level, meaning millions will still face higher bills.
The energy price guarantee will continue for a further 12 months from April, but will rise from the current £2,500 to £3,000 per year for the average household.
In sharp contrast to the aftermath of Liz Truss’s mini-Budget, markets remained calm as they digested the package. Businesses said it ‘delivers stability’ but there is ‘more to be done’ on growth.
But Tories are already voicing fury at the scale of the measures, with Conservative veteran Richard Drax warning that raising taxes on businesses and hard-working people risks ‘stifling’ growth and productivity.
Former Cabinet minister Esther McVey has threatened to rebel and others raised alarm that Mr Hunt is ‘throwing the baby out with the bathwater’.
The stark backdrop to the Autumn Statement was new forecasts from the OBR watchdog, showing that the UK is already in recession.
It also made fresh predictions for inflation, which it was revealed yesterday has jumped to a 41-year high of 11.1 per cent.
The OBR said CPI has peaked and will average 9.1 per cent this year and 7.4 per cent next year.
Rishi Sunak rolled the pitch for the announcements in a post-G20 statement this morning, saying the government was facing ‘the worst global economic crisis since 2008’
Mr Hunt told MPs that ministers have to take ‘difficult decisions’ now in order to tame inflation, which he described as ‘the enemy of stability’.
Jeremy Hunt meets pupils at St Jude’s Church of England Primary School in south London after delivering his autumn statement to Parliament on Thursday
He warned that the UK faces ‘a global energy crisis, a global inflation crisis and a global economic crisis’.
‘But the British people are tough, inventive and resourceful,’ he said. ‘We have risen to bigger challenges before.
‘We aren’t immune to these global headwinds, but with this plan for stability, growth and public services, we will face into the storm.’
On the prospect of a plunge in living standards, Mr Hunt admitted: ‘There is going to be a very big fall… in disposable income. But what the OBR says is the measures that I took today mitigate that, reducing the effect by around 25 per cent and that is very important.’
Meanwhile, house prices are expected to fall £26,550 by summer 2024 according to the latest predictions from the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR).
It says property values will drop 9 per cent by the third quarter of 2024, largely driven by ‘significantly higher mortgage rates as well as the wider economic downturn’.
That would bring the average home price to around £268,450, wiping out price increases in the last 12 months.
Permanent stamp duty cuts announced in September’s ‘mini’ Budget will only remain in place until March 2025.
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