Hello and welcome to The Rundown, a podcast from Politics Home with me Alan Tolhurst. This week,

as the budget finally looms into view, we're taking a look at one of the potential tax reforms

suggested to chancellors every year that could transform the treasury coffers, but one that this

government and every previous one stretching by decades has refused to touch Council tax. While economists and tax experts all agree

it's an unfair, outdated and regressive levy, nobody's at the political will to change it.

So to look at why that is, what it could be replaced with, I'd like to be joined by Labour MP

Jonathan Brash, chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Council Tax, along with Dan Needle, found with the Tax Policy Associates,

and two members of the Treasury Select Committee, Conservative Foreign Minister Harriet Baldwin,

and Labour's Catherine West.

So, Dan, starting with you, just explain to us why there's been a big push, I think, in the last few years to try and reform council tax.

So explain kind of why it's often seems kind of an outdated, perhaps regressive way of levying taxation.

So council tax was drawn up in a mad panic on the back of several envelopes after the poll tax riots.

They needed something. They kind of wanted something that was a bit like

the old rates, which were best to think about it as a tax on the rent you'd received if you did rent

your house out. And certainly better than poll tax, which is a flat rate tax on everyone, regardless

of where you lived, regardless of who much money you had, which did not go down very well.

Council tax had a couple of weird features.

The first weird feature is that it applies in bands.

Instead of saying you pay council tax based on 0.5% of the value of your property,

there are valuation bans.

And tax authorities like that, because particularly in those days, where computerization

was much more limited, it was hard to value stuff at scale.

...