Council Tax has become an ever-increasing share of household budgets in recent years and without action, this trend is set to continue.  Pressures on local authorities are well documented, and rising costs have to be paid for somehow, but I think we are reaching our limit as to what is acceptable and reasonable to charge households.

Many people will have forgotten that Council Tax was frozen for five successive years in the last decade, with funding from the previous Conservative Government to local authorities to enable this.  Had this not happened, today’s Council Tax bills would be much higher.  Nevertheless, many subsequent years of higher than inflation increases has brought Council Tax to levels where it is teetering on becoming unaffordable for many.

I believe it time to review local authority funding, how we pay locally and how much.  Council Tax started in 1991 and we are still using 1991 house values to assess Council Tax bandings.  This need modernising, but I suspect any changes from the current government would mask further redistributing of funding from southern England to northern Labour heartlands.    

This trend happened under the previous Blair/Brown Labour Government and is happening again under this one, where government funding formula of local authorities has been altered, to favour northern councils and inner-city councils, which are more likely to be Labour run.  This means that Council Tax becomes a higher share of overall local authority expenditure, in areas like ours in West Sussex.

Such is the complexity of government funding to local authorities, that it’s almost impossible for the public to decipher it all, making it hard to work out who is telling you the truth, when councillors claim a council is being run as efficiently as possible.  Having such complexity favours those who aren’t being accurate about that. 

Ultimately, I’d like to see much greater simplicity and transparency in local authority funding and expenditure, and a fair system of raising funding locally66.  Like in the 2010s, I’d also like to see the government fund a multi-year freeze to Council Tax bills, helping households with the growing cost-of-living pressures.  

Councillor Duncan Crow, Leader of Crawley Borough Council Conservative Group

30th September 2026