UK tax breakdown

[Jon_in_london]

Can anybody help me find a breakdown of which UK taxes are used to pay what? It seems to me that the council tax pays for just about everything I thought income and National Insurance paid for. Which kind of raises the question- wtf is all the non-council-tax tax for?

Thank you, zikomo, muchos gracias.

 

[iain]

As far as I know :

Council tax pays for services from the local council (district, borough, county, metropolitan) which includes things like roads (except motorways), schools, libraries & rubbish collection. However, council tax only meets about 20% of local council spending so the rest comes from central govt (i.e. national taxes). That's why we get these big council tax rises : if the central part stays the same, increasing local spending by 1% requires a 5% increase in council tax.

Pretty much everything else goes into Mr Brown's central pot. In theory National Insurance pays for the pensions and care of today's elderly (not for the people who pay it). In practise, I think it just goes into the pot along with income tax, death duties, VAT and every other tax out there.