– Parish council tax across England has doubled since 2013–14, found new research by the Adam Smith Institute (ASI).

– This year it increased by 8.2%, the second-highest increase on record.

– English local councils are the only tier of local government able to raise a council tax precept subject to no statutory ceiling or check.

– Local tax in Radcliffe on Trent almost tripled this year, and Preston Brook increased precepts sixfold since 2022.

– New devolution proposals, which give local parish councils even more responsibility, will only make this worse.

– To make matters worse, this is taxation without representation: ASI’s survey of local councils found that 69% had co-opted councillors, and 24% had a voting majority of co-opted, and therefore unelected, councillors.

– The smallest parish councils are also the most inefficient, spending much of their income on administrative costs: Coulston Parish Council in Wiltshire spent 72% of its modest income on a part-time clerk position.

– The ASI recommends limiting how much parish taxes can be increased each year, especially for councils ruled by unelected councillors; reviewing councils’ expenses more thoroughly; and grouping smaller councils to make them more efficient.

Research by the Adam Smith Institute (ASI) released today reveals that local (parish and town) councils, England’s first tier of local government, have been raising taxes by eye-watering amounts each year, leading average Band D precepts to double since 2013.

Local parish councils, unlike every other tier of local government, have no limit to how much they can raise taxes each year; they also have minimal checks on how the tax is spent. As the Government pushes forward its devolution programme, more responsibilities will be passed on to these uncapped, and largely unregulated authorities in the months and years ahead.

The average Band D precept grew by 8.2% in 2026, its second-highest ever increase. By contrast, the three-year average increase in council tax in England’s upper-tier county councils, where the annual increase in local taxation is capped at 5%, was 4.86% per year - half as much.

The worst offenders - England’s greediest councils - raised taxes by shocking amounts. 2026 saw parish council tax in Radcliffe-on-Trent increase by 179%, to £312.00 for a Band D property. In Alford, parish council tax rose by 64% to a Band D rate of £353.68. In both of these cases, parish council tax increased to a higher level than the district-level authorities, the paper finds. In Preston Brook, parish tax increased sixfold just in the last four years.

The justification offered for the lack of precept-increase cap is that local councils are close to their residents, and are therefore democratically accountable to them. However, local council elections are largely uncompetitive: in 2026, 67% of seats up for election were won uncontested and in 24% of councils surveyed for this paper, a majority of members are unelected co-optees.

Parish councils also face little scrutiny over how taxpayer money is spent, leading to cases of staggering inefficiency. The paper found that the smallest councils spent a median of around 30% of their income on staff costs alone. Coulston Parish Council in Wiltshire, a very small rural council, spent 72% of its modest income on a part-time clerk position. In these and other cases, the cost of simply being a council consumes much of what residents pay in, leaving little left over for services residents actually see.

Unlike other levels of government, parish councils – even those that represent cities with thousands of people and million-pound budgets – are not subject to checks that taxpayer money is being well-spent, finds the paper. Local council financial auditing, at every level, simply tests whether accounting paperwork is in order. No local council, at any spending level, faces any external scrutiny of whether its decisions represent good value for money, a test every principal authority must pass.

The ASI recommends imposing a local parish tax rise cap similar to that imposed on larger authorities; this cap would be scrapped for parishes which have a strong democratic mandate, but tax rises could still be challenged by local residents if deemed too drastic. The cap would not constrain councils from imposing one-off increases made necessary by an increase in responsibilities, such as those caused by devolution.

The paper also proposes that principal authorities use Community Governance Reviews (CGRs) to group parish councils which fall below a minimum viable operating scale under a common parish council. This would preserve each parish’s local identity while making better use of taxpayer money by letting smaller parishes share operating expenses.

Lastly, the paper argues for stronger value-for-money checks for larger parish councils. This can be achieved by adding a proportionate value-for-money commentary to the audit of councils with an income of over £200,000 - a straightforward addition to the audits that medium and large parish councils are already subject to.

Comments:

The Lord Fuller OBE, former deputy leader of the Conservative Party in Local Government, said:

"The government has awarded itself powers to abolish city councils - including some with large populations, such as Norwich, Peterborough, Oxford and Exeter - and convert them into parish or town councils in a wide-ranging local government reorganisation.

The lesson from Salisbury in a previous round of local government reorganisation is that these new historic places let rip with unconstrained council taxes greater than ever before, all whilst not addressing the things that council tax is meant to pay for - like housing, homelessness, street cleaning and planning. Local residents are being milked by ever-higher taxes without any constraints to keep the council tax within affordable limits.

I laid amendments in the devolution bill to protect residents from unlimited tax rises for parishes with a precept of more than 1 million or a population of more than 50,000. The government rejected this approach and instead introduced new taxes, fees, charges and levies that mean that local taxation has become untethered to reality and to residents' ability to pay."

James Hodgkinson, Next Generation Fellow at the Adam Smith Institute, said:

“Local councils do vital work, and in my own experience as a parish councillor, I have witnessed the positive impacts they can have on the communities they serve. But they are the only level of English local government able to hike taxes with no restrictions, no referendum, and no external checks on how well the money is spent.

With local councils set to gain more power and raise ever-higher revenues as services are devolved down the pyramid of government, it is only right that checks on how they tax and spend grow with them.

These proposals do not seek to clip the wings of good governance. Instead, they aim to establish a framework of accountability and transparency that will foster trust. Residents must have confidence in a tier of government that is likely to play a greater role across our countryside, towns, and cities.”

– ENDS –

For further comments or to arrange an interview, contact press@adamsmith.org | 07985 540467.

Methodology:

This paper utilises three principal strands of data. Firstly, existing data from the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government. This data (on headline precept rates and changes at a parish level over time) underpins much of the quantitative analysis. These figures were used to track the average Band D precept across 2013–2014 to 2026–2027, to rank the 8,888 English precepting parishes into deciles by both Band D charge and total tax raised, and to compare parish-level changes against shire district and county level council tax.

Alongside this, an original FOI campaign was run through late 2025. 300 FOI requests were sent and 159 full responses received. This data is utilised in questions around event provision and supplements existing data on co-options. The author notes that this data is likely to be affected by non-response bias, due to the large number of councils that did not respond to the FOI request despite being public authorities as defined by the Freedom of Information Act (2000).

Finally, to examine how councils spend their income, the author drew a stratified random sample of 80 parish councils across four size bands, and analysed each council’s most recently published AGAR return. Staff costs and total income were lifted directly from the AGAR Accounting Statements to calculate staff-cost-to-income ratios by size band, with reserves (AGAR Box 7) also compared against precept income (AGAR Box 2). The author notes that due to the small sample size and high degree of variance within each band, this sample should be considered as illustrative rather than representative.

—

The Adam Smith Institute is one of the world’s leading think tanks. It was ranked first in the world among independent think tanks and as the best domestic and international economic policy think tank in the UK by the University of Pennsylvania. Independent, non-profit and non-partisan, the Institute is at the forefront of making the case for free markets and a free society, through education, research, publishing, and media outreach.

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