A property is in the valuation list because a district valuer went and looked at it. Number 27A is banded, billed, and paid on time, and between 27 and 29 there is a brick wall three metres wide.
I am a revenues officer for a district council. Council tax and business rates. Fourteen years.
The valuation list is where this starts and it is worth being clear about it, because everybody assumes the council makes it up.
We do not. The Valuation Office Agency, which is part of HMRC and nothing to do with us, maintains the list of domestic properties and the band each one is in. A property gets on the list when a valuation officer decides it is a separate dwelling, and it comes off when they decide it is not.
We bill against that list. We cannot add to it and we cannot take anything off it. If a property is on the list, we have a legal duty to bill it.
27A is on my own street.
I have lived here since 2012, which is two years before I started at the council, and I noticed 27A on a working screen in about 2016 and thought I had misread it.
Number 27 is a semi. Number 29 is the other half of a different pair. Between them, because the road bends, there is a gap of about three metres with a brick wall across it and a gate in the wall into 27's back garden.
There is no building in the gap. There is a wall, a gate, and then 27's garden.
27A is in Band A and has been since the list was created in 1993.
It is billed. It is paid, in ten monthly instalments by direct debit, and it has never been in arrears.
The liable person's name is on the account, and the address for correspondence is 27A itself, and the bills go out to it every March with everybody else's.
What I checked in the first year, when I still thought it was clerical.
Whether it was a self contained flat inside 27. This is the ordinary explanation and it is why the A exists on most addresses. A house divided into two dwellings gets two entries.
Number 27 is not divided. I have been in it: the couple who live there had a party in 2018 and I have stood in every room including the loft, which has no stairs to it and a hatch and no window.
Whether it was a caravan or a mobile home. Those can be banded and they do sit in gaps. There is no caravan and no hardstanding and the ground behind the wall is a lawn.
Whether the entry was in error and never corrected. This is where it stopped being clerical.
You can look a property up on the VOA's own public website. Anybody can.
27A is there. Band A, effective from 1 April 1993.
And there is a case history, which is the part the public site does not show and which I can see because of my job. It records every time the entry has been looked at.
There are four entries.
1993, list creation. 2004, a routine review of the street. 2011, a challenge by a neighbour, which was dismissed. And 2019, when somebody at my own council raised it as a possible deletion.
The 2019 case is closed. The outcome field says the valuation officer attended and that the property is correctly banded.
The valuation officer attended.
I have read that sentence more times than any other in fourteen years.
The 2019 case was raised by a colleague of mine, at my prompting, and I remember the week it was closed because we talked about it in the kitchen and she said the VOA had knocked it back and that she was not going to spend any more time on a Band A.
I did not tell her that I was standing at my front window at the time of the recorded visit, because I was at home that day with a bad back, and I watched that stretch of pavement for most of an afternoon, and nobody came.
The direct debit.
I am not allowed to look at a taxpayer's bank details without a reason connected to my duties and I have not.
What I am allowed to see, because it is on the account, is the payment history and the name.
Thirty two years, ten instalments a year, three hundred and twenty payments, none missed, none returned unpaid.
There was one change of instalment amount outside the annual cycle, in 2008, when the payer rang us and asked to move the payment date from the first to the fifteenth because their circumstances had changed.
There is a note of the call on the account, made by a colleague who retired in 2015, and it says what those notes always say, which is the date, the request and the officer's initials.
What I do about it.
Nothing, and here nothing is not laziness, it is the law.
A property on the valuation list must be billed. If I stopped billing 27A I would be failing in a statutory duty, and the money is paid and there is no complaint from anybody.
The only discretion I have is whether to raise another deletion case with the VOA, and I have decided not to, and my reason is the 2019 outcome.
If I raise it, a valuation officer will attend.
I have thought about that a great deal, standing at my own front window, looking at a three metre gap with a wall in it, four doors up from my house.
I have decided that I would rather not find out what happens when somebody official goes and looks at it properly, and I am aware that this makes me the fourteenth person in this story to decide the same thing.