FOI release

Council Tax discounts

Case reference FOI2025/00258

Received 27 May 2025

Published 30 May 2025

Request

1. What percentage of households currently receive any form of Council Tax discount in the 2025/26 financial year? Please include all discount types (e.g. single person discount, low income-based reductions, disability-related discounts, student exemptions, etc.). 2. What percentage of households received Council Tax discounts in the 2024/25 financial year? 3. Have any Council Tax discounts or exemptions been reduced, removed, or otherwise changed in 2025/26 compared to 2024/25? If so: o Please specify the types of changes made (e.g. eligibility rules, discount rates, categories affected). o The effective date(s) of these changes. 4. Of the households that received any Council Tax discount in 2024/25, how many (and what percentage) are receiving a reduced discount or no discount in 2025/26? If possible, please provide this by discount type (e.g. single person, low income, disability-related, etc.). 5. If available, please provide any impact assessments, internal reports, consultation documents, or equality impact assessments related to these changes.

Response

Q1: During 2025-2026, for the 56118 accounts that are live during this period, 21182 (37.75%) receive some form of discount.

Q2: During 2024-2025, for the 64744 accounts that were live during this period, 25633 (39.59%) received some form of discount.

Q3: No changes were made to the Council Tax Reduction Scheme for 2025/26, except for a percentage increase to the income bands in line with the DWP annual percentage uprating increase.

Q4: We have had to respond to this using only those accounts that were active for the whole of 2024-2025 and those that have been active from 01.04.2025. To do otherwise would skew the data quite badly. For example, a person who was liable for the whole of 2024-2025 and received SPD throughout but was only liable for the period 01.04.2025-01.05.2025 would, when compared directly, have had less SPD, but would still have been entitled to 25% discount. Also, in terms of CTRS, with income uprating's taking place from April 2025, a fair comparison cannot really be drawn because of factors outside of the composition of the scheme. However, we have used the previously mentioned dataset (48456 accounts) and found:

194 with a lower disabled reduction (0.4%)

1105 with lower discounts from other discounts (empty, second homes, etc) (2.28%)

42043 with lower single person discounts (32.54%)

130 with lower discounts from local schemes (0.27%)

19959 with lower CTRS (9.65%)

As mentioned above, there could be any number of reasons for these reductions (CTRS ending partway into 2025/2026 - or not qualifying at all - a single person could have a partner join them, for example). Therefore this information is the most accurate we can provide.

Q5: Council Tax Reduction Scheme (CTRS) 2025-26

Documents

There are no documents for this release.

This is Tunbridge Wells Borough Council's response to a freedom of information (FOI) or environmental information regulations (EIR) request.