Council Tax Dispute *bumped*

benjitheman

Good evening,

I'm hoping someone can help us.

My wife and I have lived in the same house since October 2010, before I moved in my wife was in receipt of Council Tax Benefit, due to me working full time this obviously changed when I moved in and we were sent a letter stating that our monthly council tax bill would be £65 per month. This is what we paid for October, November and December.

We then received a letter stating that our Council Tax rates for the current year would be £153 per month, now, perhaps naively, we thought this was a hell of a hike and let it be, continued to pay the new amounts. I personally have had no dealings with Council Tax before and my wife has been on Council Tax benefit due to having a baby for the past 3 years, so as I say, perhaps we were naive to think this was OK, but that's what we did. We paid what was due on the first of each month.

Last month my wife received a letter stating that a court order had been taken out against her due to unpaid council tax from last year, we had to pay over £600 in total, broken into 3 payments, the first one being over £300 and due within 10 days or bailiffs would be called. Obviously we searched and found the money to pay this initial sum.

Upon calling our Council, my wife was told that a series of letters had been sent to us including a reminder in November, a reviewed tax bill in December, a final reminder in January and finally a summons to court in March. None of these letters were ever received, if they had have been received then they would have been acted upon instantly.

During the conversation, my wife was told that the tax review was to tell us that our tax bill would be increased to £153 per month. However, our December Council Tax was late being paid, and as such, we did receive a reminder letter asking us to pay our bill, the outstanding amount was £65 which assured us that what we were paying was correct and so it was paid and we thought no more of it.

We are not disputing that there may be money owed to the council, in hindsight, we should have realised when we received our bill for 2011, but like I said, because we'd not heard anything from the council, we called them a few select names and got on with paying it.

I find it quite confusing that the council state that we were sent a letter highlighting our reviewed bill in November, yet when December's payment was late, the reminder letter stated the outstanding balance was £65. Surely if we'd already been informed of our reviewed amount, it'd state the outstanding balance is £153?

We again questioned the council about the letters that had been sent to us, we were told we should complain to Royal Mail as the council had proof of postage. When I asked exactly what proof of postage (to support our complaint to Royal Mail) I was told that the only proof was that when the council raises a letter, it creates a log on their system.

Our contact at the council has stated that we have always paid our council tax and we've only had one late payment, which was promptly sorted and that has ruled in our favour. With this in mind, I think it supports the notion that we would have paid the reviewed amount had we known about it. We are more than happy to pay the £88 difference over the 3 months, totalling an arrears of £264, as this is what is due and has been paid. What we find most frustrating and don't think is right is that we have to pay the other £350 of costs etc.

No one in their right mind would ignore these type of letters, especially a court order. We've had no other issues receiving post, only from our council. I have spoken to our contact again today and he has agreed to let us pay the remaining balance between July and March 2012, working out to an extra £22 per month. Quite a step down from the letter we received stating that the full balance must be paid in 3 installments.

Does anyone know where we stand in pursuing a complaint, do we stand any chance of escaping these extra charges?

Any advice would be most welcome.

Apologies for the long post.

McKneff

No one in their right mind would ignore these type of letters, especially a court order.

I think you would be surprised at how many people do. Hoping it will all go away, its fear, its head in the sand but it happens.
Are you absolutely 100% sure that they havent been received or your oh has received them and been afraid to deal with it.
It happens, happened to my daughter when her partner got made redundant, he got al the bank statements, and hid them,
he didnt tell her for 9 months that he had been made redundant, he thought he was just going to walk into another job but
it didnt happen and it just snowballed from there.

CIS

No one in their right mind would ignore these type of letters, especially a court order.

In my authority we must issue , on average, 1000 summons per month as wells as another 1000 or so in Reminders & Second Reminders.


Assuming that the council are billing to the correct address then you need to be looking at one of two potential issues - Royal Mail are not delivering it or its being delivered and not being dealt with.

When the council have said they've posted so many documents then they will have done , there's nothing to gain by claiming to have sent them and not. I probably here 3-4 times every day that documents have not been received or even been sent - many of these times I have actually sent them myself....

benjitheman

Thank you for your replies, I can absolutely categorically state that these letters have not been received. If they had have been received then they would've been dealt with, we're not in a position where we couldn't afford to pay the bills if they had arrived so there's nothing to gain by ignoring them.

I can appreciate that the council have nothing to gain by not sending them, however, they definitely haven't arrived at our address. It wouldn't be a case of either my wife or I hiding them from the other as sometimes I take the post on my way to work and other times my wife picks it up.

CIS - I appreciate you must hear hundreds of times a day that letters haven't been received, just looking at it and I know it reads like the most basic of excuses as to why to something hasn't been paid, but whilst we may struggle at times, council tax is not something we would ever ignore, we've a 4 year old little boy that quite likes his home and wouldn't like to be kicked out of it! I can hand on heart say that we have never, ever received these letters. Do you have any advice on what we can possibly to do to get to the bottom of this?

Any help would be very much appreciated.

Ben

StuieUK34

i went down a similar route, and in terms of complaining, i was told "The council can do as they please, and you havent got a hope in hell of re-course should they mess up"....
Funny thing for me was, i never went into arrears at all with council tax in a 1yr period, yet i had the court letter rubbish and 'was taken to court' and courts awarded somthing or other....
End result was i paid a £60 fine on top of my council tax..
To put that into english, i pay'd monthly by cheque or cash, hand delivered to the council office. Because i didnt pay Direct Debit, they took me to court and won... Was never given the option to defend myself and ask why i am taken to court, given records show i have never been in arrears....

Councils are a law to themselves, and the use morons that work in courts are too.... Not what you want to hear, but your screwed!

benjitheman

Thanks for your reply StuieUK34, sorry to hear you had a bit of a torrid time with them. They certainly do seem to be a bit selective in the questions that they have chosen to answer so far, but we can only keep trying to get to the bottom of it all. We've lodged a complaint with Royal Mail on the advice of our contact at the council so we'll see where that gets us.

It still really confuses me as to why we received a reminder letter stating an outstanding balance of £65 despite this apparently being a month after we were sent our revised bill stating we'd be paying £153 monthly, surely the outstanding balance would be £153 as opposed to £65. If it had said that then at least we could've rang them and been told over the phone of our revised bill and explained nothing had been received, thus saving all this time, stress and money!

Ben

CIS

To put that into english, i pay'd monthly by cheque or cash, hand delivered to the council office. Because i didnt pay Direct Debit, they took me to court and won... Was never given the option to defend myself and ask why i am taken to court, given records show i have never been in arrears....

The summons would only have been issued if you were in arrears - most likely as you paid by cheque the money wasn't cleared until the after the due date in which case the council have acted legally - the fact you didn't pay by Direct Debit would not be a reason for the summons.

benjitheman

Sorry to bump an old thread back to the top, but we have complained about our case and received an email back from the council.

There's a couple of things in the email that have confused me and I'd like some advice on where we stand and what steps we should take next.

As highlighted in the original post, we are in dispute over a Liability Order being issued against us when we were unaware that any action was being taken. We complained about the handling of our case and the reply states that -

"A local authority serves a large volume of documents under section 233 of
The Local Government Act 1972 by sending them in the post. The
Interpretation Act 1978 states that service is deemed to be effected by
properly addressing, prepaying and posting a letter containing the document
and, unless the contrary is proved, to have been effected at the time which
the letter would be delivered in the ordinary course of post. The summons
was served under regulation 35 of The Council Tax (Administration and
Enforcement) Regulations 1992 which provides for service by post at the
persons usual abode."

However, in the same email the council state that the correspondance was sent to the incorrect address, not entirely incorrect, however, our address ends with Place and it was sent to Terrace. We have since sent a blank letter to the incorrect address over a week ago and it hasn't been received to our correct address yet.

The council are still adament that all the correspondance with regards to our case was sent but, as we have already said, it has never been received here by us. My job dictates that if serious court action was taken against me then there is a likelihood I could lose my job, therefore, it's safe to assume that we'd do everything we could to avoid this action. However, the action was taken because we knew nothing about it!

Do we have a case to argue further as they have admitted sending the letters to the incorrect address? The above paragraph that I quoted says that "
The Interpretation Act 1978 states that service is deemed to be effected by
properly addressing, prepaying and posting a letter containing the document
and, unless the contrary is proved, to have been effected at the time which
the letter would be delivered in the ordinary course of post." - surely this hasn't been "properly addressed" as it was sent to the incorrect address.

Any help would be appreciated,

Many thanks.

John_Pierpoint

Is there an address xxxxxxx Terrace?
If so have you been round to see the poor unfortunates who have been receiving your court papers etc.?

A question in general - Is one allowed to involve the Local Authority Ombudsman in council tax mal-administration cases?