Have your say on our proposed council tax support scheme for 2024/2025

What this consultation is about

We help people on low incomes with the cost of their council tax by awarding them a discount to reduce their bill. This is known as the Council Tax Support (CTS) scheme.

There is a national set of regulations for a CTS Scheme for pension age customers, but we decide the rules for our own CTS schemes for working age people in our area. This consultation is only about the rules for the CTS Scheme for working age people.

We review the working age CTS Scheme each year and we are proposing some changes from 1 April 2024. We want to know what you think of these changes so we can take your views into account when we make our final decision.

Why we want your views

We want to make our CTS scheme more generous so we can give people additional help and allow extra people to qualify for our scheme.

CTS is a discount which means people pay less council tax, so this affects our income and our budgets. Making our CTS scheme more generous means we award more discounts and have less income.

Changing our scheme could affect our flexibility in providing extra services such as community grants. Therefore because of this we want to hear the views of as many people as possible, whether or not they receive CTS, so we can take these into account when we make our final decision on the scheme.

Our scheme now and the changes we are proposing

We have considered several options for changing our working age CTS scheme and decided on our preferred choice.

We want to make our CTS Scheme more generous by also updating our rules so they are the same as the national CTS scheme. Lots of our rules are already the same but in the past we have amended some and they are now less generous than the national scheme. These differences are explained below, and the changes we would like to make are also shown.

More detailed and technical information is available in the CTS report considered by Cabinet on 1 August 2023. This is available on our website.

How many people this would affect

A CTS discount is currently given to 5,200 working age people. 1,500 of these would get an extra CTS discount if we changed the scheme and would pay less, or no, council tax.

More people would also be able to claim CTS if we changed the rules as we describe above. At the moment we do not know how many people this would be.

What will be the financial effect

The effect of the CTS discounts is split between us, Norfolk County Council and Norfolk Police and therefore we don’t have to pay for the full amount. Our share is around 7% of the total.

The CTS discounts we already grant to our household tax payers amount to a total of £10.9 million, our proportion being 7% or £750,000. Making all the changes listed above will give a total estimated extra CTS discount of £260,000 to working age people in the area. Our share of this is about £18,000 (7%).

How you can have your say

We want to know your opinions of our proposals, and there are questions which ask if you agree or disagree, and your reasons why.

We are also asking whether you have any other suggestions and for you to explain these in your own words.

There are also some questions about your circumstances and we use these answers to see the range of people who have replied.

You do not have to complete all the questions, but we would appreciate as much information as possible to help us make our final balanced decision.

The consultation will open on 21 August 2023 and close on 1 October 2023.

View the Council Tax Support Scheme 2024/2025 consultation survey