For decades the same neighbourhoods contained vastly different economic lives. The reassessment has surfaced the difference in a way nobody quite knew how to handle
By Lowri Griffiths. Reported with input from Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.
North London has, for as long as I have lived here, contained a particular kind of paradox. The same postcodes, the same streets, in some cases the same buildings, have housed people with vastly different economic lives. The retired teacher in the council flat upstairs from the City lawyer. The market porter on Tottenham High Road and the consultant whose terrace, three streets away, is worth 1.4 million pounds. The structure was always strange. The 2026 council tax reassessment has surfaced it in a way that nobody, on any side of any local political coalition, quite knew how to handle.
I have been reporting on the reassessment for three months now. I have spoken to council officers, to ratepayer organisations, to constituency MPs, to the genuinely angry retired residents of N17, and to two members of the Treasury team who would prefer not to be named. The pattern that has emerged, across all of those conversations, is reasonably clear. North London is, in operational terms, becoming two different cities. The reassessment is the first official document to acknowledge it.
What The Reassessment Did
The 2026 reassessment, the first comprehensive update of council tax bands in England since 1991, was meant to address a long-standing problem. Bands set in 1991 had become, over thirty-five years of London property inflation, almost entirely disconnected from current property values. A house in Highgate worth 4.7 million pounds was, until last month, paying council tax in the same band as a flat in Bounds Green worth 320,000 pounds. The system was, by every honest reading, broken. The reassessment was supposed to fix it.
What the reassessment has done, in operational practice, is reveal that the broken old system was substantially redistributive in a way nobody had quite consciously chosen. The old bands undertaxed expensive properties and overtaxed cheap ones. The new bands, by being more accurate, have shifted the tax burden upward for the wealthy and downward for the poor. This is, on every progressive measure, the right outcome.
It has also produced, across the wealthier parts of North London, a level of public anger that has surprised even the council officers I have interviewed. The Highgate residents’ association produced, last week, a statement describing the reassessment as a, quote, “wealth tax disguised as administrative reform.” The phrase has been picked up enthusiastically by the local Conservative association.
For ongoing coverage of the reassessment, see MyLondon.
The Specific Numbers
I have looked at the numbers for the streets I know. A representative four-bedroom Edwardian house on Crouch Hill, valued at approximately 1.7 million pounds, will see its council tax bill rise from 3,400 pounds per year to approximately 5,800 pounds per year. The increase is substantial. It is, in absolute terms, slightly more than the average annual cost of a primary-school child.
A representative two-bedroom former council flat in Hornsey, valued at approximately 380,000 pounds, will see its council tax bill fall from 1,800 pounds per year to approximately 1,200 pounds per year. The decrease is also substantial. It is, in absolute terms, slightly more than the average annual cost of one good winter coat.
The two adjustments are, on any honest reading, modest. The Crouch Hill household paying an extra 2,400 pounds will not be made poor by the change. The Hornsey household saving 600 pounds will not be made rich. The principle of the change, which is that property tax should reflect property value, is broadly defensible. The howling response from the wealthier parts of North London has, however, been disproportionate to the actual scale of the adjustment.
What The Howling Reveals
The howling, on careful examination, is not really about the 2,400 pounds. It is about the symbolic recognition that the wealthier parts of North London have, for thirty-five years, been receiving an unacknowledged subsidy from the rest of the borough. The subsidy was real. It was, in cumulative terms, substantial. It was, until the reassessment, comfortable in the sense that nobody was specifically required to think about it.
The reassessment has required everyone to think about it. The thinking has not gone well.
I attended a public meeting in Highgate last Tuesday. The audience consisted of approximately 200 residents of properties valued, on average, at around 2.4 million pounds. The most common phrase used, across approximately fourteen separate speakers, was some variation of “I worked hard for this.” A close second was “we are not the wealthy ones, the wealthy ones are in Mayfair.” The chairperson at one point read out a written statement claiming that the residents were, quote, “being asked to subsidise their neighbours.”
The chairperson did not appear to recognise that the reassessment was, in fact, ending such a subsidy rather than imposing one. The audience did not appear to recognise it either. I left the meeting somewhat troubled, less by the specific claims than by the apparent difficulty of recognising one’s own historical relationship to the structures one is part of.
The Other Side Of The Borough
The other side of Haringey, which is to say the parts of the borough where the reassessment has produced reductions rather than increases, has been substantially quieter. I have spent time in Tottenham, in Northumberland Park, in parts of Wood Green that the Highgate residents’ association would, I think, struggle to locate on a map. The response in those neighbourhoods to the 600-pound annual saving has been, from the people I have spoken to, modest gratitude.
One Tottenham resident, a school administrator I have known since reporting on the 2017 fire risks story, said, “It’s helpful. Every bit is helpful. But it’s not transformative.”
This is, in some honest accounting, the most accurate framing of the entire reassessment. It is not transformative. It is a modest correction to a system that had, over decades, drifted from its original intent. The fact that the modest correction has produced a political crisis in Highgate while producing only quiet acknowledgment in Tottenham is, I think, what the actual story here is.
The Political Aftermath
The political consequences of the reassessment are still developing. The local Conservative party, which had been struggling in Haringey for decades, has experienced, since the reassessment was announced in March, what their internal communications describe as a, quote, “remarkable surge of new member sign-ups in the western half of the borough.” The new members are, on the available evidence, almost entirely residents whose council tax bills have just gone up.
The Labour party, which has dominated Haringey for three decades, has been responding to the reassessment with what one councillor described to me as, quote, “the difficult task of taking credit for something we did not actually do, while being blamed for it by the people who can afford to be angry.” The councillor added: “It is not the easiest political position I have been in.”
An ongoing analysis at The City covers comparable property-tax reassessments in New York, where the political dynamics have been similar. Reading the parallels has been, for me, professionally useful and personally somewhat depressing.
What The Reassessment Has Made Visible
What the reassessment has made visible, in the end, is the structural reality that the old system had successfully obscured. North London is not, in any meaningful sense, a single community. It is two communities sharing the same pavements, the same Tube lines, the same schools in some cases, but operating in separate economic structures whose intersection has been, for thirty-five years, mediated by a council tax system that quietly transferred wealth from one to the other.
The transfer has now stopped. The community whose subsidy has ended is angry. The community whose burden has been reduced is grateful but not transformed. The borough’s politics have, as a result, become substantially more legible. Whether they have become more workable is, I think, a different question, and one that the next council elections will partly answer. More by Lowri Griffiths.
Related at The Poke.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/north-london-two-cities-council-tax/
