I'm grateful for the question and also for the interest that Members of the Senedd and members of the public are showing in the issue of council tax reform. It does affect every household across Wales, so it's right that every household should take an interest and share their views with us. I think one important thing to stress is that just because a property has increased in value over the last 20 years, it doesn't mean that it would necessarily see an increase in their Bills. What matters is where your property is in relation to all other domestic properties in Wales and whether or not that has changed. So, that's important to recognise, as well as the fact that the aim of the exercise isn't to raise more money overall; it's to raise the same amount of money, but to do so in a way that is fairer. So, that's important to recognise.

It's always good when people come forward with different ideas of how we might look at things. Certainly, the potential way forward that has been described reminds me of the work that we did when we looked at a local income tax, to see if that's something that could replace council tax, going forward. In the end, we did discount that particular idea, because local authorities don't have access, routinely, to household income information for every household. That could be particularly difficult, then, to access. People's household incomes change all of the time, and one of the benefits of council tax, as it stands at the moment, is that it's a relatively simple tax in many ways. But property is only half of your council tax; the other half, of course, is the occupants of the property.

There are lots of mitigations that are already built in to the council tax system that do take account of people's ability to pay, such as the council tax reduction scheme, which supports more than 220,000 households across Wales, and the single-person discount, which benefits around 500,000 households in Wales. Together, these kinds of measures mean that nearly half of households in Wales don't pay the maximum council tax bill. So, it's really important, as we move forward, that those mitigations are also looked at alongside the work that we do on council tax reform, insofar as the property side is concerned, to ensure that we provide support to those people who need it most.