Living in London is expensive, and sadly the Big Smoke likes to remind us unfortunate city dwellers just how eye-wateringly spenny it is at every chance it gets. The next thing coming to deplete our already suffering bank accounts is council tax, as the tax has just risen above £2,000 a year in almost half London’s boroughs. Better get saving up.
Thanks to council tax hikes across the country, residents in 15 of London’s 33 boroughs will have to pay more than £2,000 a year if they live in Band D properties or higher. The new tariffs come into play next month.
The boroughs of Bexley, Croydon, Harrow, Havering, Kingston, Richmond, Sutton and Waltham Forest were already charging residents more than £2,000 annually, but they’ve now been joined by seven more local authorities: Barking and Dagenham, Brent, Camden, Enfield, Haringey, Lewisham and Redbridge.
Residents of Kingston will be forking out the most, paying £2,374.32 a year. They’ll be followed by followed by Croydon (£2,366.91) and Harrow (£2,286.32).
Contrastingly, London’s cheapest borough, Wandsworth, will only charge £961 a year. We know where we’ll be moving next.
Kingston’s Liberal Democrat leader Andreas Kirsch said the council was ‘working harder than ever to find even more cost effective ways of providing the best possible services to residents’, and evidently, that comes at a serious cost.
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