RE: Council Tax Re-valuation. I'm sure we are all pleased to read (EA, Sat Feb 5) the council's assurance that house values in Swindon have not sufficiently increased this year to trigger a general re-banding of council tax.

However, the question arises, why should higher values trigger this re-banding exercise?

The idea of banding was to ensure that owners of higher value houses paid more tax than those with lower, on a sliding scale.

As all property increases in value by a similar percentage across the board why cannot the bandwidth be adjusted by the same percentage to accommodate these increases?

The practice of moving property up into a higher value band would, if carried to its logical conclusion, result eventually in all property being in the highest bands.

To maintain the differential, extra bands would need to be added at the top end of the scale, whilst lopping off those disused bands at the bottom, which is ludicrous.

This policy would also result in a grossly unfair burden on all council tax payers.

R MORSE

Swindon