Single person discount

If you are the only adult living in your house you may be entitled to a 25% discount on your yearly Council Tax bill.

To qualify you must:

• be the only adult over the age of 18 in the property
• live in the property as your main residence

If someone else lives in the property over the age of 18 and they are a student they may be disregarded. By disregarded we mean that they are not 'counted'  when working out how many people live in the property.

If you need to apply for single person discount because you have just moved in to the property please fill out our change of address form.

Apply

Single person discount review

All households in Maidstone claiming a single person’s discount of 25% on their Council Tax are checked for authenticity. This is part of an ongoing review to validate single person discount claims. This also includes identifying and removing those being claimed in error or fraudulently.

A 25% discount is given to anyone who claims to be living in a property on their own. Approximately 21,000 people in the area claim this discount.

Checks are carried out to see whether people are genuinely living alone, by cross-referencing with other sources of information about their household such as the electoral registers and financial information.

Anyone who does not respond to requests for further information will have the discount taken off from the beginning of the current financial year or from the date the discount was applied. If during the review process checks indicate that another adult is living at the address, the discount will be removed and a penalty may be applied for failing to notify a change in circumstances.

If you receive a review from the team please complete it and return it to them. If you need any help completing the form or any further information please contact the compliance team.

How we make our checks

We are using information that we hold on our Council Tax records and data from credit reference agencies. This data can indicate who may be living at an address. We are still writing to all customers as this information may not be reliable. This may be due to:

• customers not informing us of changes in the number of people living at an address
• a previous occupant still having credit activity or correspondence at your address
• a customer using variations of their name for example the use of middle names
• the data supplier has incorrect information relating to the property.

We write to customers so that we can make sure the information we hold is correct and that discounts are awarded to those people who are entitled.

Accessing data

Under the Data Protection Act, we can use data held by credit reference agencies to investigate single person discount claims. Your data remains secure and is only used for the review.

Credit reference agencies

Credit reference agencies are companies that compile information from many different sources.

They provide this information in the form of credit reports which helps decide whether to grant an application for a loan, credit card, or provide another financial product. Both local and central government have access to the information in some circumstances, particularly to identify and combat fraud.

There are three major credit reference agencies in the UK:

• Experian
• Callcredit
• Equifax