Barclay Implementation Advisory Group: Appeals sub-group final report

Annex A: Council Tax appeals

Appeals linked to Council Tax include:

• Non-list appeals – these relate to Council Tax, specifically amounts payable, penalties, the chargeable status of a property and building completion notices.  
• List appeals – these relate to the alteration of the valuation list (this is the list maintained by Assessors of all domestic properties for Council Tax purposes). Formal challenge of information on the valuation list can be made by the submission of a “proposal” to the relevant Scottish Assessor. If a taxpayer remains aggrieved following an Assessor’s proposal decision they may appeal to their VAC. However, no proposal to alter the valuation list may be submitted where a previous proposal has been considered based on the same property and facts and appealed to a Valuation Appeal Committee.

The SAA provided to the Scottish Government their best estimate of the number of Council Tax appeals in the past five years in order to provide an indication of caseload (Table 5).^[32] 

Table 5: Number of Council Tax appeals, Scotland, 2014-15 to 2018-19

As with non-domestic rating appeals, while these figures can provide some indication of the potential magnitude of the number of Council Tax appeals relative to the number of non-domestic revaluation appeals in the system, Council Tax appeals may vary markedly from year to year, for instance if a particular issue arises in a large estate.