Council Tax. Council's powers to obtain information

Wee_Willy_Harris

Barry_D wrote: »

Mostly, yes; but a tenancy agreement can contain clauses which extend the liabilities of one party or the other and which are not considered in the 1988 Act - in which case that Act would provide no mechanism for either the landlord or tenant to respond in respect of those clauses.

None of which would be of any interest to Council Tax. Apart from that, most tenancy clauses are unenforceable anyway as they contravene the minimum rights of one party.

clutton_2

Barry - you really have NO idea what a complete prat you appear on this forum have you ?

Barry_D

Wee_Willy_Harris wrote: »

Apart from that, most tenancy clauses are unenforceable anyway as they contravene the minimum rights of one party.

Not sure where you get this about most of them being unenforcebale from. There are other Regulations which must be considered when starting from scratch in drafting up an agreement, such as the Consumer Contracts Regulations 1999 and the Housing Act 1996. If worded correctly an agreement would not be unenforceable

Barry_D

clutton wrote: »

Barry - you really have NO idea what a complete prat you appear on this forum have you ?

Hardly merits a response, but I think it's blatantly obvious that I haven't quite reached the standards set by certain others on here...

Wee_Willy_Harris

Barry_D wrote: »

Not sure where you get this about most of them being unenforcebale from. There are other Regulations which must be considered when starting from scratch in drafting up an agreement, such as the Consumer Contracts Regulations 1999 and the Housing Act 1996. If worded correctly an agreement would not be unenforceable

Which is why I said...

Wee_Willy_Harris wrote: »

Apart from that, most tenancy clauses are unenforceable anyway as they contravene the minimum rights of one party.

.... Any clause which attempted to remove legislative rights would be unenforceable.

tbs624

Barry_D wrote: »

Totally agree - but if a tenancy agreement is unenforceable (for example, perhaps because of the way it has been written) then the tenant(s) may not be legal tenants, may become sitting tenants, may leave without notice, may sublet, or whatever. If the council uses such a tenancy agreement to determine liability they may not necessarily be heading in the right direction.

The council tax officers would have no way of knowing whether a tenancy agreement is legal or not unless they had it scrutinised by their legal team - and then that has the potential to open up a whole new can of worms.

They just want to see the tenancy agreement which shows the property address, the names of both LL and T, and that the tenancy agreement requires the T (who is named x) to take responsibility for the CT payment from this date to that.

Your reluctance to give them sight of the tenancy agreement suggests that maybe you have clauses in there which would be unenforceable and that you can't sleep at night for worrying that the CT officers will pass it over to the TSO , who will contact OFT to seek a revision order as a matter of urgency

However, presumably your legally qualified family will have drafted up a first rate agreement so you should have nothing to worry about

Pick your battles - as Clutton has said, should your T ever need to claim LHA she will be required to hand over a copy of the AST agreement. Hell, even HMRC might want a look........if your T ever has issues with you, the private sector rentals team will ask for a copy, plod might ask to see it if your T had cause to complain about harassment or attempted unlawful eviction..

There are some things worth a battle but most would view this as not one of those. It isn't your medical records, your bank statements or your computer browsing history that they are asking for so unclench your buttocks and just send the CT office a copy.

You could, however, always try posting your query over on LLzone rather than prolonging the agony on here

ILW

I think this may be a case of Aspergers on the part of the OP. Common sympton is obsessing over irrelvent matters.

Svenena

This thread is hilarious. But it does make me want to bang my head against a wall.

Just out of interest, if the council (or some other authority) wanted to see the copy of a tenancy agreement, but there wasn't one (my understanding is that you can have an AST without a written contract?), how would you get around this?

chewmylegoff

This does seem very odd, I've rented and owned in a number of different councils, I've never been asked to prove to the council that I have the right to pay them council tax!

Whilst I don't really understand your reticence in giving them the tenancy agreement to make them go away, if you will not do so then why not just give them an extract - the first page of my current tenancy agreement specifies the names of the parties and the term of the agreement, so should in theory be enough for them coupled with the signed page at the end. The rest of the contract is irrelevant for their purposes.

Alternatively redact anything in there that you don't want them to see.

If the information is not relevant to what they are doing then I doubt they would have any recourse to this approach; their statutory powers of compulsion apppear to only extend to establishing the identity of the person who should be paying the bill, therefore this would appear to extend only to ascertaining the identity of the tenant and the period of tenancy, and therefore would not extend to other information in the tenancy agreement.

But anyway, just give it to them already.

Barry_D

OK...we're now on page 6 or 7 of this thread and so many of you have got yourselves into such a lather! :rotfl::rotfl::rotfl::rotfl:

Yes, this thread IS hilarious...there are 109 replies and only one has come up with a piece legislation that is of any relevance.

If I had wanted to know your opinions on whether I should or shouldn't do A, B or C with a tenancy agreement, I would have asked that in the first post. I didn't.