From April 2013, council tax benefit has been replaced by the council tax support scheme. Council tax support helps people on lower incomes with their council tax liability. Under the old council tax benefit, the council received a grant from the government to cover the cost in full. However, council tax support is funded only partly by the the government, meaning tht the local authority must make up any shortfall.
We consulted for 2013/14 about reducing maximum support by as much as 35%. However an extra grant from government meant that we could limit cuts in support, setting the maximum entitlement at 91.5%, rather than the worst case scenario of 65%. Unfortunately this funding was available for one year only, so we now need to consider what the maximum entitlement will be for 2014/15 and the future.
People who are of pension age will continue to be protected from changes and remain entitled to maximum support of 100%.
We are not proposing any other changes to our scheme, other than a possible change to maximum entitlement as mentioned above. Any changes would take effect from April 2014, and would be for a minimum of one year.
We could choose to fix the changes for longer than one year and we would be interested in your views on whether we should do this.
