Monday January 15th, 2007
We’re in the process of filming a Tonight with Trevor for 26 January on Council Tax; specifically following the Council Tax Cashback: How to save thousands article. It’s a massive issue; I suspect the number of people this impacts is in the high 100,000s or possibly even over 1,000,000. Yet we’re having a funny little problem with it…. who do you interview?
There are the case studies of course, but they’ve all come from here; the system of people getting rebates and rebands without a change in use, isn’t written about anywhere else (as far as I know), and as the article was the headline of the email (which goes to 830,000 people) about four months ago, there’ve already been a hundreds of successes and many more are in the pipeline. Yet as the producer said “there’s not much point you interviewing people asking them how to do it, when they found out how, by reading your system from the article.”
Of course, we could interview the valuations office, but there’s not much to say. We will speak to the estate agents who did the initial valuations, to add some context. Yet ultimately who should be held to account for these errors – the 1991 Major cabinet? The current government? Neither seem quite right. It’s an interesting conundrum, luckily the core of this programme is the savings people have made and how to do it – and I think the producers will come up with a good vehicle to make that watchable and informative.
