To expect the council to know where our flat is???

[Butternutsquash22]

Just had a debt collectors letter through the post, saying that I owe over £1000 of council tax. This came as a surprise seeing as im a full time student and had already sorted out my exemption forms etc last year.

Phoned to sort it out today, got some useless guy on the phone trying to tell me that I hadn't done the tax exemption forms, even though we phoned at the time to confirm that they had been received (mine and H2bs, and they had).

Decided to go into the office to see if we had more luck and finally got to the bottom of our problem. We were listed as living in 2 different flats in our block, 1a and 1/1. Apparently our basement flat is officially called 1a, while the girl on the 1st floor is flat 1/1. No idea why a basement flat would be 1a!?!?

Am I being unreasonable to expect my local council to be competent, and to have a sensible system for flats?? Doesn't sound like too much to expect to me!!

... Rant over...

our council has 'it's own' system for labelling flats in our city, different from the royal mail!!!!

council uses: 1F1 for first floor flat 1, 1F2 for first floor flat 2, 2F1 for second floor flat 1.

post office / royal mail use the door number / a single number from 1 for 1F1 upwards..

so my old flat that i am selling is both 12 (2F2) and also 12/8 depending on who i am dealing with

hahahahahahahahaha expects council to be competent hahahahahaha

Thanks. I needed that laugh.

Glad I gave you a laugh Hecate, I can see now why that is too much to ask, never had much dealing with them before, but now know what sort of standards to expect.

Was pissed off because it's mine and h2bs first flat lving together, and I was so proud of us for making sure everything was done correctly etc, for them to hen mess it up... Grrrrr!!!!

YANBU. When I was a student we got lots of letters threatening us with the bailiffs for non-payment, then when we phoned up it was always "We can't find the paperwork". In the end my flatmate's mum went and shouted at them!

'council' and 'competent' in the same sentence? Now you don't often see that

Never expect the council to be competent, then you can only be pleasantly suprised.

I worked, briefly, for the housing dept in a council. It drove me bloody batty. I couldn't see any consistency anywhere and nothing seemed to make any sense. - how they did things, how they decided things, etc. And nobody ever seemed to know what was going on!

And my training for the job consisted of a headset, a manual, being plonked on a desk to answer phone calls and figure it out for myself.