How did the Welsh government manage to reform council tax in 2005?

Abstract

Repeated calls have been made for council tax (CT) in the UK to be reformed. A ‘tyranny of the status quo’ suggests that politicians will avoid this because they fear a backlash from the losers of reform. This paper claims that the tyranny of the status quo is not a fixed law. The Welsh government revalued CT in 2005 but did not communicate the complexity of reform sufficiently. Reform requires greater efforts to communicate the complexity of winning and losing.

Keywords:

• Council tax
• property tax
• revaluation
• tyranny of the status quo
• Welsh government

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank PMM’s referees for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper. All remaining errors are my own.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rajiv Prabhakar

Rajiv Prabhakar is a lecturer in personal finance at the Open University, Milton Keynes, UK.