On 1 April 1991 John Major was a newish prime minister, it would be four months until the first public website appeared and Chesney Hawkes topped the charts with The One and Only. Oh, and the property valuation for council tax came into use.
Since then the internet has vastly expanded, Messrs Major and Hawkes have been forgotten, but the valuation is still there.
This matters because the tax now charged by each council bears in some cases very little relationship to a property’s value.
As the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) has noted on the valuation’s 30th birthday, this means the amount of council tax charged is based on what a home was worth in 1991.