Cross the road and add £500 to bill

Dyers Lane in Barnes is a road divided. On one side is a row of privately-owned Victorian terraced cottages that change hands for anything up to £400,000 each. On the other are blocks of housing association flats inhabited mainly by the elderly.

Come this April, the gap between the two will get even bigger. For down the middle of the road runs the boundary between Wandsworth and Richmond-upon-Thames boroughs, which are about to set the lowest and highest council taxes in London respectively.

Bridget Collins, 70, and her lorry driver husband Charles, live in one of the housing association flats on the Richmond side of the road. Their council tax for next year will go up from around £1,000 to £1,100.

Across the road, retired electrical retailer Robert Stevenson, 74, who owns his three-bedroomed house and admits being "comfortably" well off, will find his council tax going down from £679 to £600.

The fact that the road's poorer residents will be paying nearly twice the amount paid by its better-off residents infuriates Mrs Collins, who has to get by with her husband on his £200-a-week salary. "I think it's terrible that Wandsworth charges so much less," she said.

"We are not wealthy people at all, unlike the people who live over the road, but because my husband still works we don't get income support or anything and we have to pay the full council tax rate.

"It stretches our budget a lot, even though we don't get any better services."

Mr Stevenson said: "I'm delighted to be paying less this year, although it is ridiculous what Richmond are charging people over the road. I am a Tory voter anyway, but I do think that Wandsworth does a good job."