Is everyone's bastard City Council as trigger-happy with the summonses over slighty late Council tax - or just ours??!

[UnquietDad]

So DW and I have been paying our council tax here religiously for the last god-knows-how-many years. We still send the cheque and the payment slip.

One month earlier this year we were a bit late sending it in. And I don't mean totally taking-the-piss late, I mean a few days.

We got a nasty letter.

And I mean a nasty letter.

I phoned them up, spat my vituperation down the line and told them the cheque was already in the post and that it wouldn't hurt them to be a little more patient. The girl on the other end of the line was actually pretty defensive and mouthy, but I let it go.

We sent off our July, August, September, October and November council tax payments on time with no problems.

In December we were a few days late again. A few days. Literally. Partly thanks to our busy lives and partly thanks to the post. You know how it is in December.

This time we got a really, really nasty letter, saying we had lost the right to pay in instalments as we had "remained in arrears" - and threatening a summons.

Let's just run that one past you again...

A fucking summons.

Because they had looked at June, and they had looked at December, and they had concluded that the "arrears" were continuous, rather than discrete.

I'll tell you what I did next if anyone is interested. But first of all I want to know if we are alone in having such twats as public servants, or if our Council is just typical...

they won't summons you, you aren't in arrears, a judge would laugh them out of court.

exactly squirells. let then waste our money on shit disguised as 'efficiency' maybe someone will call in some 'system thinkers' and correct the whole god awful mess

not worth a stamp becuase judgey person would piss

the fuckers sold our council tax debt after we fell behind and now we pay it to a debt collector and they are nicer, more efficient and flexible.

tis a farce

I'm not going to defend council tax but I did used to work for them.

The deal is that it is central government legislation (and yes I was pissed off that most of the money goes to the COUNTY council not the city council) but the instalments are due ON the 1st of the month. It is bog standard over the country. If you want to pay weekly you are meant to be sent a letter stating that you are still covered by the terms and conditions of the monthly payers (ie central government didn't legislate for weekly or fortnightly payers)

We were lenient, we set our parameters so that if people were late paying by about 10 days it didn't send out a reminder.

If you miss one payment or are late you get a reminder, if you bring it up to date but subsequently miss another you are meant to get a second reminder but it will state that this is the last reminder we will send and if you are late again or fail to make up this payment you will lose the right to pay by instalments.

If you do miss again then you get a final notice telling you to pay the full balance for the year. If you can't (and at this stage we would not negotiate a payment arrangement - why would we as the person has shown they have failed the original one) we would go court.

Now before you think this is where you get your 5 minutes in front of a judge think again. We would submit 1500 cases per court hearing! The judge nods, we get to sit in a room and rubber stamp the court's approval. It is a magistrates court not a county court so no CCJ.

Then and only then a liability order is granted whereby the council have a legal right to have an income and expenditure form AND your EMPLOYMENT details. We would then agree a payment arrangement knowing that this time we could take money directly from your salary if you failed this time. Or take bailiff action, make you bankrupt, put you in jail. The latter 2 are rare but I have known them done.

It is a fixed percentage taken from your income and would make you cry with how much central government would take.

My advice, let anything else slide other than your council tax.

Forgive me! It was just a job, I was a debt collector before that.

Oh and just to point out, there is a difference between those who WON'T pay and those who CAN'T. We made every effort with those that couldn't pay who were having financial difficulties.

I loved being termed a cunt when I was a Council Tax officer - almost better than being a secondary school teacher in some ways! The class of abuse tended to be more varied, and the threats to firebomb my home were always entertaining too.

The mechanism for the billing, collection and recovery of Council Tax is set out in the Local Government and Finance Act 1992, and the Councils are following what the legislation tells them to do.

If you have a staff of 30 people running the CTAX section for a city the size of Plymouth (over 100,000 CTAX payers) where I used to work; there wasn't time to establish that if someone had paid late on more than one occasion they were neither wilfully refusing nor displaying culpable neglect. They were picked up by the system and sent a statutory recovery notice with the wording as mandated in and by the legislation.

Had I spoken to you on the phone, I would have reinstated your instalments...but get a D/D for God's sake..if it cocks up, then it's either the bank or the Council who have erred, and you won't get another recovery letter.

Had I received your letter I would have quoted you chapter and verse extensively from the legislation and sent you a D/D mandate or a S/O so it could click out of the bank each month. That would have been after it hat sat in my pile for a month as there was too much work.

You need to get the CTAX paid on time, for as Fizzy says above, the attachment of earnings levels are eye-watering. They could also go for Mrs UQD as there is joint and several liability here as well.

I never got threatened but then I never did poll tax just ctax. I think we billed 40,000 ctax properties (that may include business rates as well) and we had a staff of around 9!

If I remember correctly (and this is going back about 5 years)when I got to attach my ex-boss's earnings I took over 10% of the first 1500 he earned and then a GIANT 50% of anything he eared over that!!!! I smiled for about 6 weeks (he had just made my friends redundant, it was a nice payback)

We would always go for the highest earner as the percentage would net us more money.

Scaryteacher puts it better than I did, it is all legislated so we didn't have a lot of control. But yes the DD or the S/O is the best way to go.

Someone threatened to 'get' me when I was interviewing them outside court one day. He'd been inside for killing someone, so it wasn't just having worked on CC that was risky, but CTAX too!

It always makes me laugh in a weird way when people get shitty about money they owe (and I am talking about when it gets to the court)

I sent the bailiffs round to one guy and the neighbour said the guy we wanted was out because he worked shifts for the police.

I did an attachment and his MOTHER came on the phone to sort out his account. The guy was 27!!! I had to explain to his mother that he had ignored at least 9 letters starting with reminder and ending with the attachment. Maybe he didn't read his post

Can see why you became a teacher, although I did love my job for the sheer variety of people on the phone.