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Money Box: Council Tax empty home warning, Grexit fears, Mind the gap, Cheap data

Council Tax empty home warning, Grexit fears, Mind the gap, Cheap data

20/06/2015

BBC Radio 4 - Money Box, Council Tax empty home warning, Grexit fears, Mind the gap, Cheap data

The council tax surcharge resulting from spending too much time doing up an empty property

Spending too much time doing up an empty property could result in a council tax surcharge. Plus Grexit fears, mind the pay gap and how to avoid those shock mobile bills.

On Money Box with Paul Lewis:

Will Greece default on its debt? If so - will it leave the Eurozone? If so - will it leave the European Union? And if any of those things happen what will it do to our savings, investments, and - what many are asking - our holiday plans? Economist Vicky Pryce and independent financial adviser
Claire Walsh discuss the implications.

Beware. If you have an empty property it can be charged not just full council tax instead of none or half but super-full-to-overflowing council tax even though you do not live there or use any of the local services. One couple, struggling to do up an empty property as their first home, think this is unfair. But the Government says it's a useful measure to discourage homes from being left empty for long periods of time when they could be rented out to ease the housing shortage. Aurelia Allen investigates.

The latest Money Box travel tip: How to avoid shock mobile bills when abroad. Can data you don't expect still prove your undoing? Gautam Srivastava, telecoms expert, Money Supermarket, joins the programme.

The latest ONS figures show that average pay rose by 2.7% in the three months to April compared with a year earlier. And that is the highest rise in real terms since October 2007. But there's a difference between public and private sector pay awards. The increase in public sector pay is tiny (0.3%) and in private sector pay correspondingly bigger (3.3%). The programme looks under the bonnet of the data with Mark Beatson from the CIPD.

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