Official Statistics

Council Tax: challenges and changes in England and Wales, March 2020

Statistics on challenges against and changes made to the England and Wales Council Tax valuation lists between 1 April 1993 and 31 March 2020.

Documents

Background Information Document

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Challenges and changes: financial year summaries March 2020

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Challenges: time series summaries March 2020

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Council Tax: challenges and changes, March 2020 (CSV)

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Pre-release access list

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Details

This release provides statistics on the challenges against entries in the Council Tax valuation lists for England (1993) and Wales (1993 & 2005), including the outcomes of the challenges. It also provides statistics on amendments to the Council Tax valuation lists.

For the first time, this publication includes annual statistics from 1993/94 to 2019/20. We are including the additional statistics in response to identified user needs. Please note that as a consequence the layout and table numbering is not consistent with that used in previous releases.

As part of our drive to improve the quality of our Official Statistics publications, we are currently reviewing the methodology used to create the statistics showing insertions and deletions to the Council Tax valuation lists (previously tables CTCAC 3.0 and 3.1) and so these are not being released this year. We plan to reintroduce counts of insertions and deletions as part of an improved content of the Council Tax Stock of Properties release that will be published in 2021 (The Council Tax Stock publication to be released on 24 September 2020 is unaffected).

This Challenges and Changes release does include the number of proposals and appeals that resulted in a property being inserted to or deleted from the Council Tax valuation lists. It also contains statistics showing the number of amendments made to the Council Tax valuation list in 2019/20, where the methodology has been revised to more accurately reflect the number of amendments made to the Council Tax valuation list. Statistics are published at national, regional and local authority level.

The figures are derived from data for England and Wales, taken from the VOA’s administrative database relating to 31 March 2020. There are however delays in processing the data and so the data used to produce these statistics were extracted on 30 June 2020 to allow for this. There is also a small degree of retrospection in the administrative data for earlier years for which official statistics have previously been published, which have now been revised with the statistics published here.

Counts are rounded to the nearest 10 with counts fewer than five but greater than zero reported as negligible and denoted by ‘-’. Counts reported as not applicable are denoted by ‘..’. Totals may not sum due to rounding. For further details on the information included in this release, including a glossary of terms and a variable list for the CSV format files, please refer to the background information.

The key highlights from the official statistics are, the VOA had:

  • Received 43,650 challenges in 2019/2020
  • Resolved 42,120 challenges in 2019/2020
  • 8,500 outstanding challenges as at 31 March 2020

Of the resolved challenges, 62% resulted in no change to the Council Tax band.

If you have any questions or comments about this release, please email the VOA statistics team:

The VOA statistics team

Updates to this page

Published 20 August 2020
Last updated 20 August 2020 + show all updates
  1. New release

  2. First published.

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