Introducing Choose Your Band

Choose Your Band is a radical new approach to the Council Tax designed to
address a number of social and economic problems.

For an overview, click on the image to download a PDF of the brochure.

Choose Your Band (front cover)

Further Details

What other options could be combined with Choose Your Band?

The TV license could be included on the council tax bill, keeping it visible, but providing a saving on administration.

A government could opt to mandate that second homes and rental properties move to the Location Bands scheme, which would remove tax administration on a significant number of properties.

A government would be wise to put all new build properties into the Location Bands scheme to keep administration costs down.  This could be a choice left to each individual authority.

What restrictions would there be on switching bands?

For properties that are not occupied by the owner, they would need the occupier's agreement (as they still pay the bill) to change to a different Classic Band

Once a property has moved to Locations Bands, it cannot move back to Classic Bands.

How would government revenues be affected?

Each property that moves to Location Bands will improve the governments financial position, due to the hysteresis built into the band cash adjustments.

As the economy grows the income from Location Bands will improve with location values, and will gradually allow other taxes to be phased out.

A Breakthrough in "Affordable Housing"

Complex and restrictive shared-ownership 'affordable housing' schemes have significant problems:

  • opaque leasehold contracts leaving most buyers in the dark as to what is involved when they sell
  • complex three-way ownership (occupier, bank and registered social landlord), resulting in high legal fees and the shyness from banks to provide mortgages.
  • very few mortgage options, leading to uncompetitive rates

Choose Your Band resolves these problems by allowing the rented 'share' of the shared ownership to be replaced with a cash lump sum to buy that share outright from the vendor/developer.

It is the same tenure as private housing - it is private housing. The buyers get a full choice of mortgage providers; ability to market the house themselves; competitive legal fees.

Choose Your Band allows home ownership for all, not just the lucky few.