Council Tax Shake-Up Off the Agenda as Rayner Faces Hartlepool Challenge...
Hartlepool Labour MP Jonathan Brash Challenges Council Tax Gap — But Rayner Has No Overhaul Planned...
12th November 2026
The Secretary of State for Housing, Communities & Local Givernment Angela Rayner has said she is not working on an overhaul of council tax, after Hartlepool MP Jonathan Brash openly challenged the fairness of the system.
Appearing before the Commons Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee on November 11th, the Housing Secretary said no replacement had been announced and further changes were not currently a focus of her work.
Brash contrasted an annual Band D bill of roughly £1,000 in Westminster with £2,500 in Hartlepool. Those were the approximate figures he put to the committee.
He also questioned what had happened to work her predecessor had described on making the system fairer.
Rayner responded to this by saying : “I am not doing any work behind the scenes on council tax.”
She defended the Government’s approach to distributing council funding according to need, arguing that previous funding arrangements had disadvantaged deprived some local communities.
The exchange leaves residents once again without a timetable for any fundamental overhaul of a system that many say is now so unfair & regressive, that council tax Payments now overtake their mortgage payments as the highest household bill.
For households across Teesside and County Durham, one longstanding feature is that council tax bands in England still use property values from April 1991.
That means the valuation date underpinning today’s bills is more than 35 years old, with even newly built properties being assessed by a reference to what they say a property would have been worth at that date, rather than simply being placed into a band using their current sale price.
Calls for broader reform of the punitive & outdated Council Tax System have already reached Parliament. The Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee previously recommended beginning work to overhaul or replace council tax, with a clear explanation of the fairness and economic impact of any new system.
In its response, the Government noted the recommendation but failed to commit to implementing it. It also rejected giving individual councils full responsibility for changes such as revaluing properties and redefining Council Tax bands.
A separate measure is however planned for the most expensive homes, with the Government announcing that a High Value Council Tax Surcharge scheme will be implemented from 2028/29, with charges of £2,500 for properties worth over £2 million and £7,500 for those worth over £5 million.
However, the parliamentary briefing explaining that proposal makes clear that existing council tax bands would remain, with the surcharge being an addition to the system, rather than its replacement & would likely have little, if any impact on local government funding on properties in the North East of England, due to the inherently low property values of the region.
Calls for council tax reform have persisted for years, with towns such as Hartlepool in the North East of England seemingly at the centre of concerns over fairness and the impact rising council tax bills are having on child poverty & low income working households, with repeated council tax increases said to be becoming increasingly difficult to justify when residents are said to be seeing very little improvement in the services they receive. That frustration has only deepened questions about value for money and confidence in the council, with even the town’s Labour MP pressing ministers for change, & the Government’s response offering little hope that a fundamental overhaul of the Council Tax System is coming any time soon
