The proposed Council Tax

<p>In April 1991 the Government set out its proposals for replacement of the Community Charge (poll tax) by the Council Tax. This paper analyses the structure of the new tax and examines its distributional effects. Section II describes the proposed tax and demonstrates how it is hybrid of poll tax, property tax, household tax and income tax. Section III outlines the effect of the grant system and variations in local government spending on Council Tax bills. Section IV describes how we modelled the shift between the tax bases of the Community Charge and the Council Tax, while Section V presents our results. we present estimates of the effects of a switch to a version of the Council Tax as close as possible to the Government's original proposals, and then for four variants to this structure designed to illustrate the importance of different elements of the hybrid tax. Section VI summarises the results.</p>