33 high-tax areas are being short-changed by the state. Do you live in one of them?

Telegraph

12-05-2025

For the amount of tax they pay, you could forgive the people of Elmbridge, Surrey, for expecting a little more from their local services. On a sunny Monday morning, Julia and Barry McCance are running some errands in Oxshott. It's a pretty commuter village with a few shops and a busy cafe, Munch and Wiggles, which this morning is filled with 30-somethings working on their laptops and retirees enjoying a gentler start to the week. The McCances, in their seventies, have lived in the borough for 35 years. In this leafy corner of England, residents pay, on average, the fifth-highest income tax in the country and the second highest council tax. 'And we can't get our footpaths sorted out,' says Julia.
'I've written so many times to try and get the footpaths done. Especially that one up there – that is unbelievable, somebody is going to have a really bad tumble. It's uneven.'
Does the couple feel as if they're living in one of the highest tax paying areas in the country? 'No,' they say, put simply.
The potholes don't help. 'We've got a lot.' Nor do the 'constant roadworks', which often seem to be for everything other than repairing the road surfaces themselves. For Barry, who is retired from a career in banking, it's 'the lack of coordination' that baffles him. 'One week they're putting the telephone [wires] up, the next week they're plumbing, the next week it's the electrics. It's delay after delay after delay on what is a very busy road.'
His frustration makes rather more sense when you understand that this area has one of the largest deficits in public spending relative to tax in the country. In other words, residents here are paying far more into the system than they are getting out of it.
On average, those living in Elmbridge pay £15,857 annually in income tax and £1,023 each in council tax. One in four households are in the top two council tax bands, with many households paying £4,458 a year. Once you take into account other taxes, people here pay an average of about £21,400 total in direct taxes.
As for what they're getting back, The Telegraph estimates the average resident is benefitting from about £10,900 in spending on core localised services – that's everything from nationally funded healthcare, welfare and policing, to bin collection and road maintenance, which are covered by local council budgets. It amounts to a deficit in overall spending on public services relative to tax of more than 50 per cent, or £10,000, for a typical resident.
The Telegraph analysed localised council and welfare spending estimates, produced by the Office of National Statistics and the Department of Work and Pensions, as well as regional spending on key services like healthcare and policing, to see how tax and spend impacts different parts of the country.
The figures reveal that 33 of 294 council areas in England, including Elmbridge, pay more in these direct taxes than they take out through localised services. All 33 are in the south of England.
Increasingly, these parts of the country are funding a system which is fraying at the edges. In 2024, London and the South East paid almost half (45 per cent) of the country's income tax bill, up from 37 per cent in 2000. In return, they got just 34 per cent of all public spending.
The Government's tax policy is hitting these areas hard. Someone earning £69,628, putting them in the top fifth of London earners, is now paying £584 extra in tax compared to 2021, due to threshold freezes. Someone leaving a £750,000 estate to their relative would pay £85,000 more in tax, due to thresholds frozen since 2009. The average homebuyer in London pays £14,100 more in stamp duty than someone in the North West.
Meanwhile, services nationally have collapsed. An additional three million appointments are in the NHS backlog, with recent declines glacial. Police charge rates – the proportion of recorded crimes resulting in a charge – have fallen from 15 per cent to 5 per cent in less than a decade. Some 82 per cent of roads flagged for maintenance were left unrepaired last year – a record high.
The local elections on May 1 demonstrated the extent to which the public's faith in the two mainstream parties is disintegrating. What seems clear is that one of the issues underlying voters' anger is a sense of a growing gap between what they are putting in to the state and what they are getting out, specifically when it comes to the quality of public services. Labour won a victory in 2024 on the promise they would fix public services. 75 per cent of the public felt public services had declined over the previous five years. Ten months on, and recent Ipsos Mori data shows that only a quarter of voters believe they will see improvements to public services within the next two to three years.
'There is a real sense that we put in a lot and we don't get a lot out,' says Chris Hopkins, political research director at Savanta, the polling firm. And in many cases the data appears to support that view.
Elmbridge has the second highest deficit in spending on local services relative to tax in the country, behind Kensington and Chelsea and above Westminster. It is an undeniably clean, attractive area with high property prices, but the deficit stands to reason for those residents who have an overriding sense that while their taxes increase again and again, they are not getting what they pay for. 'I live in an apartment, I'm a single mum with a 16 year old,' says Shani Sparkes, on her way to a business meeting in Oxshott 'and I don't feel as though I get an awful lot back.'
'Do I feel like there's a fair return?' ponders Christopher Harrison, out to pick up the paper on the high street in Cobham. 'Not when they leave the rubbish out and fail to collect it. [...] It happens once every six weeks.'
Harrison, 79, a retired solicitor, is now paying a 100 per cent council tax premium on his second home in Cornwall. But his main tax complaint is the inheritance levy on his pension, 'which I think is iniquitous'.
Scott Willett owns a bathroom and tile showroom in Oxshott and lives in nearby Molesley. He is in the midst of a battle with the council about the business rates on his showroom – the rateable value has been set at twice his current rent. 'I'm paying about £1,000 a month just for business rates here. And what do I get? For them to empty the bins out the back? What else do I get for it?'
Overall, he says, it's 'tax, tax, tax. But then, I thought once we got through Covid, somewhere at some point we're all going to be paying for that.'
Galling, though, when the bins behind the showroom aren't collected. It's fairly reliable in Molesley but it can be hit and miss in Oxshott, he says.
The grim irony is that at the other end of the scale, in areas where there is a surplus in the amount of spending relative to tax, not all residents reap the benefits. Funds are often funnelled into welfare bills and school places, while the potholes and street cleaning can be just as bad. The areas with the highest surplus in the country are Burnley, Middlesbrough, Sandwell, Sunderland and Blackpool, all of which benefit from more than twice the amount of spending on local services relative to tax. But those local areas have a very high spend on social care while taking far less tax. Fewer taxpayers contribute overall in those areas, either due to worklessness or retirement.
Barking and Dagenham, in east London, has a very high spend balanced against a very low tax intake. The borough has the second highest spend per person in the country on local services. The demographic there is very different to Elmbridge. The borough has the second highest spend on Universal Credit per head, which makes up roughly 44 per cent of total local government spending overall. An estimated £1,672 is handed out on average to more than 32,000 households. In Elmbridge, Universal Credit spending is the seventh lowest in the country at £493 per head.
It's a younger population in Barking too. The £5,326 spent per head is mostly influenced by the high number of children in the borough. Local authority spending on schools costs £1,469 per person, with 7.9 per cent of the population aged under five – the highest proportion in the country. In Elmbridge, just six per cent of the population are four and under.
Meanwhile, as one of the country's youngest boroughs, Barking and Dagenham spend just £817 per head on pensions, which is half the national average. This is compared to £1,671 in Elmbridge, where almost one in five people are at retirement age.
As it's in the capital, it's also saddled with higher staffing costs for everything from healthcare to policing, which only adds to the bill.
The number of children in the area means there are a high proportion of residents who are unable to pay tax. There are also those who are not eligible due to being benefit claimants. On average, just £1,940 is collected per person from income tax, compared to £9,794 on average across London. The Telegraph estimates a per capita spend on direct services of £16,456 compared to a tax bill of £7,816 per person. This creates a surplus of £8,640 per person.
But that surplus doesn't necessarily make the borough a better place to live. In Elmbridge, Ipsos polling shows that when asked about their quality of life, people have a net satisfaction of 52 per cent. In Barking, it's minus 12.
Indeed, the idea there is a financial surplus among households in the area is news to people in Barking, where there is a sense things are as stretched as they ever were. Phil Waker, who has been a Labour councillor in the Labour-run borough for 21 years, says there are significant 'cost pressures', admitting: 'We need to do better in terms of value for money in my view.'
Population growth inevitably puts pressure on local services. Waker wonders if the council thought projected growth in the borough would be a route to more funding from Whitehall. 'I think our leadership saw the growth as a way of solving the problem. You get more money. But with more people, you get more cost as well. And I don't think they took enough account of that.'
Waker's party has held a majority in the council since the Sixties. He admits that when it comes to 'frontline services', the money isn't, he feels, always being funnelled towards areas 'where there should be spending'. He cites street cleaning as one example. 'We've cut another £200,000 off residential area street cleaning. And I think we need more street cleaning.
But 'we manage to do the bins', he insists. 'There have been times over the last ten years where there have been a few issues, but the bins are ok.'
At rush hour on a Wednesday morning, people flood into Barking Underground station on their way to work. The streets are busy, the high street rundown, rubbish collects at the ends of some residential streets. It couldn't be further from Cobham, and yet, if you live here, figures show you should be getting among the best returns for your tax in the country.
'The local services here are appalling,' says Carole Hulbert. 'You can see down our road. We've lived here many years. They don't maintain it. The litter. It's always being dumped around the corners. The trees – they used to maintain them twice a year.'
The road where she and her husband Richard have lived for 50 years was finally resurfaced last month after 15 years of ineffective patch-up jobs. Fly tipping is a big problem, they say. 'You're getting mattresses. And that's landlords, not residents. [...] They just dump the mattresses around.'
'It's the same Labour Party that has been in Barking for years,' adds Richard.
The council, he says, do their best to keep on top of it. 'They come round with a lorry and pick it up, so you can't complain.' But some of the problems speak to the way the area has changed.
Up the road, Pauline Garcia Mora says that many of the houses have become multi-tenanted. 'Because there are now six or seven people living in a house, the refuse is enormous. There are loads of problems with fly tipping. People are not invested because they're moving on. It's not families here anymore.
'We've been here 35 years and it was all families but now it's people who are not invested in the area and don't care. There are lots of social issues because of that as well.'
Like the Hulberts, she feels the local government and police do what they can with the hand they have been dealt. 'To be fair, I know there are so many problems and the money is just not there and you have to accept that at the end of the day.'
Some efforts have been made to deal with the people often found drinking outside the station. 'They have recently got community police – they're definitely more visible. At the station there are [officers] where people are begging and drinking. They're not allowed to be there now. They can be moved from the area. That was a huge problem.'
She and her husband, Juan, are considering moving. 'You just don't feel safe because there are a lot of people drinking everywhere at night. It's just very run down.'
How does she feel about the idea that in some other areas, people pay more in tax but get less back in public spending? 'Well that's not fair is it because they should get the same as everybody else.'
A council spokesman says Barking and Dagenham 'faces some of the most intense financial pressures of any council in the country', with 'growing demand on our services – driven by rapid population growth and a surge in the number of vulnerable residents requiring costly interventions'.
'We have the highest level of deprivation in the capital and the percentage of children in poverty has been consistently above the London average for the past decade.'
The cost of delivering services is 'increasing, and the funding we receive hasn't kept pace,' the spokesman says, adding: 'We understand that the issue of littering and fly-tipping is very important to our residents… we're working really hard to combat waste that is being left on our streets by a small selfish minority.'
If it's difficult to get things done in Elmbridge, where people are paying among the highest taxes in the country, and in Barking where they are paying among the least, there is an argument to be made that the system isn't really working for anyone. And that feeling, it seems, was a driving force behind the local election results, which saw the Conservatives lose 676 seats and Labour lose 187.
Evelyn Hughes, 75, a retired nurse from Elmbridge, perhaps puts it best: 'I think they take too much money off everybody.'
'Council tax is nearly unbearably high,' says Frederick, 84, who has lived in nearby Cobham for 37 years. 'Obviously I would like it to be lower, everybody would, but I'm not entirely surprised.' He is pragmatic about these things, but like others he does wish something could be done about the potholes, which are 'just horrendous'.
Joanna Treacy agrees. 'It's supposed to be a well-to-do area, so the roads do let it down,' she says. 'The potholes are terrible.'
Tim Oliver, leader of Surrey County Council, says the majority of council tax 'is actually spent on services that many residents do not see, including over 70 per cent of our budget spent on adult social care and children's services'. The council, he says, 'delivers a huge level of investment in the county, including new children's homes, care accommodation, improved roads and town centre infrastructure, and community-led projects'.
An Elmbridge Borough Council spokesman says the council 'only receives 10.6 per cent' of the council tax paid by residents, with the rest going to the county council and police. The areas of dissatisfaction raised by residents speaking to The Telegraph 'are not areas of responsibility for Elmbridge Borough Council, except waste collection, which has a 85 per cent satisfaction rating in our most recent residents survey'. The council's own survey found 40 per cent of people in the borough felt they provided 'value for money'.
But it's clear that not all residents agree that they are well served by their local services, whether it's roads, the police or the NHS. While council elections in Elmbridge were postponed due to the reorganisation of local government, it's likely that elsewhere many councillors lost their seats due to a wider dissatisfaction with the Conservatives and Labour – and the sense that taxpayers are not getting value for money.
Ross Banner, a semi-retired psychotherapist, has lived in Cobham since 1984. Like many in Britain, he has seen the local GP services deteriorate hugely. 'The GP is nothing like it was 20 years ago,' he says. 'You can't see your GP anymore. It's rubbish. The function is perfunctory. I never see the same person. I've been misdiagnosed three times out of the last five times I've been in there.' And, he adds, 'The roads aren't great'.
But Banner, 67, loves the area he has called home for more than 40 years. 'I wouldn't want to live anywhere else.'