They started off by loading their silos with disparate issues — stamp duty thresholds, home information packs, low interest rates — but the main battleground on the housing front has turned out to be council tax. The current rebanding exercise taking place in England has, through a lack of accessible information and obfuscation, given many homeowners sleepless nights and genuine worry that they are going to be much, much worse off. A lot of people look at the current council tax bands, then look at the value of their property — the average rise in a home’s value since the original council tax valuation process in 1991 has been 162 per cent — and are terrified that they will jump not one band but several.

Presently, the top band, H, is for properties valued (and these were valued by the Inland Revenue’s executive agency, the Valuation Office Agency) at £320,000 and above. When you consider that the average house price in London is about £260,000, according to the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, and nationally about £160,000, there is the potential for an awful lot of households to be an awful lot worse off.

In Wales, the revaluation came into force this month, but this was done in conjunction with rebanding. Some bands were made bigger, some smaller and a new, top-rate one was introduced. And while the majority of homes remained in the same band — and some even went down a band — one in three faced an increase in their bills through being up-banded. Although Wales introduced a transitional protection scheme, which meant that you could move up only one band in one year, according to the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS), this has still cost Welsh council tax- payers £53 million over and above local council tax rate rises this year.

Should we be surprised that the Government will be raking in more money from the council tax? Well yes, actually. In the 2001 Local Government White Paper, the Government pledged that the revaluations would be fiscally neutral — but if the same type of model used in Wales is adopted in England, then RICS estimates that this will mean an increase of more than £2 billion in revenue collection.

Michael Howard said that the Conservatives would call a halt to the process. At an election press conference last week he said: “We will stop Mr Blair’s next stealth tax dead in its tracks by cancelling revaluation. Based on what happened in Wales, this will save seven million homes in England from paying more, each and every year, for the typical household.”

The Liberal Democrats, meanwhile, plan to replace the council tax with a local income tax, which they say will — if I am picking my way through Charles Kennedy’s wretched sleep- deprived performance correctly — be based on people’s ability to pay. Which is, broadly speaking, the same basic principle as the council tax: therefore the bigger your house or your salary, the more you will pay.

The Labour Party is remaining relatively quiet about what it is planning to do with council tax until the autumn, which is when the Lyons review of the tax is scheduled to report its findings. Sir Michael Lyons’s independent report into the system will make recommendations on how best to reform council tax, taking into account the revaluation.

Unfortunately, Charlotte Atkins, a junior transport minister, went a little off-message and said in a radio interview that Labour, too, would scrap the tax. “We are scrapping the present system because it is regressive,” Ms Atkins said on BBC Radio Stoke last week. “It was brought in by the Tories and was their way of overcoming the fiasco that was the poll tax. Michael Howard was the architect of it.” Ms Atkins later released a statement saying that perhaps she had made an error. “Sorry,” she said. “I admit that I got this wrong. I recognise that our policy is to retain and reform the system and not scrap it.” An easy mistake to make, obviously, the two options being so similar.

Only the Liberal Democrats seem to have grasped — albeit in a somewhat cack-handed way — the sheer iniquity of basing a tax on property prices that bear no relation to their owner’s ability to pay. The political parties can debate this until the cows come home, but the bottom line is that house prices rise in line with market forces over which we have no control. And if you are in a borough — any of the London ones, for example — where house prices have rocketed — then your council will find its government grant for local funding is cut, meaning, yes, higher council tax bills.

And yet, with the prospect of an extra £2 billion a year in the coffers without actually having to do a thing, which of the parties is really going to reform the system properly?

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