Council Tax Debt
Every year we are presented with a bill for Council Tax, and we can pay it in one go, two or three payments, or by direct debit in 10 instalments.
If we miss any we can lose the right to pay in instalments altogether, and that’s often the first step down the slippery slope to enforcement action.
Nationally only 1 - 4% of Council Tax is uncollected in any financial year.
If you can’t clear the arrears by the end of the financial year the local authority will issue a summons and a hearing date will be set.
It doesn’t matter whether you attend the hearing or not.
When the magistrates find you guilty, they'll grant a Liability Order to the council.
The only evidence they need is an unpaid bill for council tax.
What happens next varies from council to council:
a)The council could apply for an attachment of earnings order and get money taken from your wages each week or month
b)If you get income support or jobseekers allowance, the council can apply to have direct deductions made from your benefit each week.
c) If you owe more than £750 in arrears, and the council can’t see any other way to get the money from you, and you appear to have lots of assets or equity in your house, they could start bankruptcy proceedings, and they'll start that with a statutory demand.
d) finally, the council could try to get charging order on your house, if you own a house and have sufficient equity in it to make it worthwhile.
But these things will take time and manpower which costs money, so you can’t really blame the council for wanting to use Bailiffs, because Bailiffs don’t cost them anything.
14 days before enforcement action can take place, the council or bailiffs are supposed to write to you telling you of their involvement.
It is often called a pre-enforcement notice, and if you get one it is an important document because, it will tell you that a liability order has been granted against you, and how much that order is for.
If you pay the council the amount on that enforcement notice - that should be the end of the matter and you have no further obligation to pay any more to anyone.
I used the words “should be the end of the matter”, because once the council has passed the account to the bailiffs, the bailiffs will almost certainly turn up, unless you give them a reason not to.
Councils often don't do any checks on whether bailiffs should be used, or pass information that you given to them that might suggest using bailiffs is not appropriate.
They prefer to rely on the bailiff reporting back to them
Most people do finally pay their arrears off sooner or later, and occasionally the council write the debt off as unrecoverable.