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Hello and thank you for downloading the more or less podcast.

We're your weekly guide to the numbers all around us in the news and in life and I'm Tim Harford.

This week the Office for National Statistics is projecting that the UK population

will increase by almost 10% over 15 years. How did they reach that number?

We try to figure out how much it costs when you pay senior doctors to cover for striking junior doctors.

And the country's allotment holders are greatly perturbed

at the suggestion that vegetable gardens are bad for the planet.

We will look into that, never fear.

But first, council tax may be increasing in April, and amidst the news coverage of that

invigorating prospect, several loyal listeners spotted some surprising numbers.

The Guardian quoted the Northern Powerhouse Partnership as saying that a household living in a house

in Hartlepool worth 150,000 pounds was paying more than £200 a year more in

council tax than someone in Westminster in a property worth 8 million pounds.

It does seem strange that you might rent or own a house in Westminster worth more than 50 times

as much as a place in Hartlepool, yet get away with paying less tax. So is it true? I spoke to Kate Ogden

from the Institute for Fiscal Studies. Let's start with the basics on Council Tax.

So the Council tax that you pay on a property depends what

band it's in. Properties are placed into bands A to H depending on what they were

worth back in 1991. And then it also depends on the council tax level which is set by each

council. Back when these bands were set up the top band was a property with a value of

over 320,000 pounds.

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