Streets that came out streets ahead

Published on Wednesday 10 September 2008 22:07

DOZENS of Scottish families are celebrating a £100,000 windfall after it emerged they have been wrongly banded for council tax for the past 15 years.

Rebate cheques have been dropping through the letterboxes of 57 homes in the Langlee area of Galashiels, Selkirkshire.

It follows a successful appeal last year to Scottish Borders Council’s assessor by one householder who felt his property should be in band A instead of band B.

Following an investigation the council accepted that “certain house types” in Primrose Bank, Marigold Drive and Aster Court were in the wrong valuation category.

A spokeswoman said yesterday that they had managed to trace everyone who had lived in the houses since 1993 and reimbursed them for the error.

It is estimated the residents received an average of 2,000.

John Davidson, 74, of Primrose Bank, who received a rebate of 775, said: “It came totally out of the blue. We got a letter in May to say they were looking at the assessment of our property and then in July the cheque came in the post.”

His wife Armine, 70, added: “The money came in very handy as we were flying to Guernsey for the christening of our grandson. It is not every day you get money from the council but at least they were honest enough to go through the process.”

Angie Farrell, 48, a healthcare assistant with NHS Borders, and husband Thomas, 50, a labourer for Scottish Borders Council, received a rebate of 1,524 which they plan to spend on a holiday in Lanzarote and a new leather suite.

She said: “We just believed that the council was banding us right. You just get on with it and pay all this money. But I must admit it was nice to get the back payment. We deserve a good holiday away, just the pair of us together.”

A council spokeswoman said: “We have a duty to ensure that anyone who has overpaid council tax gets that money back and we are making sure that happens.”

Research published last year suggested that as many as one in seven properties was wrongly valued in the early 1990s.

This was because valuation was left to an error-ridden system based on guesses by estate agents.

If a home was placed in the wrong band its owners will have overpaid thousands of pounds since 1993.

The discovery came when the consumer champion website moneysavingexpert.com checked the banding of seven houses. Its founder, Martin Lewis, said one was definitely wrong, another possibly so.

If the pattern was repeated throughout the country’s 21 million homes, millions of owners could be entitled to money back. About 2,000 objections against bandings were lodged in the Borders alone in the first year.