My local council are a bunch of idiots.

Poppy9

taxiphil wrote: »

By setting up a Direct Debit with the council, the OP has acted properly and had every intention to pay, in advance. Believe it or not the council is paid to get their operations in order. The OP is a layperson who is not paid to keep an eye on the council's operations. The council has a statutory duty to make taxpayers aware of payment arrears by sending out reminders, and it has failed in this. Hence it is entirely unfair that the OP should be forced into debt by being made to pay a year's Council Tax in advance.

No one who pays their council tax by installments over a year is paying in advance - you are paying in arrears. As previsouly mentioned Council tax is due and payable on 1st April 2007 for the 2007/8 financial year. It is also sufficent for the council to prove that they have a system in place to issue a reminder for outstanding monies. The council does not have to prove that they were received i.e. by sending them by recorded delivery. Most councils issue two reminders before instigating legal proceedings. The first reminder is usually a 'gentle' reminder and the second one more demanding. The letters are produced automatically by a computer system. I know that my local council can produce reports off their system that details all transactions/letters/telephone conversations for my particular address. The court will then decide if they have followed appropriate procedure to recover unpaid monies based on this information.

adouglasmhor

Offer them the outstanding ammount straight away and then offer to complete the payment schedule, if as you say they have made an !!!! of it before and it is documented and you offer them a compromise solution, explaining you have not got the money to pay it all at once, and be nice about it (catch more flies with honey than vinegar etc.), you may find you can sort this all out without court and hassle etc.


And if you live off charitable donations how can you claim loss of earnings if you do go to court?

Cerro

Poppy9 wrote: »

I'm shocked that you say that you should not have to check your bank balance every month. I check mine every few days on-line. Banks make mistakes and it's a lot easier to monitor your account while recent transactions are fresh in your mind. Also being a good MSE I calculate what funds I need for the next few transactions and put the balance in an on-line saver to maximise my income.

It's people not checking their bank accounts and being blase towards managing their money that end up over drawn and with bank charges.

It's your money and you have to take responsibilty for it.

You took my quote completely out of context - if you had bothered to read you might have spotted:

Cerro wrote:

The average Joe should not have to check his bank balance every month (not everyone gets paper statements you know) to make sure that some useless fool in the council has bothered to collect the monthly fee.

I'm on MSE - you think I wouldn't bother to check my bank account? Of course I do, what I don't do is [SIZE=-1] scrutinise every single transaction[/SIZE] to make sure that someone has bothered to take a bill. Obviously something large would be easily spotted.

Looks to me like you are just using any excuse to blow your own trumpet. I might as well add I have never had an overdraft (even as a student), needed a loan or had any form of debt at all... never missed a single payment either and long may it continue. But if some bean counter at my local council failed to take money from me at the agreed time and then demanded I pay it all immediately and more or face legal action - I would feel somewhat aggrevied, much like how I imagine the OP feels now.

Do try and pay attention to what people post...

olly300

OP I had a problem with my local council.

First they refused to spell my name correctly. I say refused because I sent them my name 4 times in emails which they responded to by an email acknowledgement and an duplicate incorrectly addressed bill twice. In addition the electoral roll department managed to spell my name correctly from the email I sent them.

So I wrote a complaint letter sent via recorded delivery to the Director of Finance and then got a reply back from the actual department saying they have sent me a duplicate bill. It was worded in such a way that it implied it was not their fault they couldn't address the bill to me when in fact my first email to them was before I moved into the property.

As they hadn't sent a bill in my name in the first place I pointed out to them that the bill was not areplacement or duplicate bill for me as they stated but the first bill they had sent actually addressed to me. I also implied that they were incompetent. (At the time the council tax bill was the only bill I had to use with my address on to register at doctors etc.)

Next I received a remainder from them which was very alarming. The first thing you could see in the envelope was a pink leaflet with the words "court summons" in the middle in large letters. (If you call this a gentle remainder I don't know what you call hard one.)

I complaint again via email and pointed out that I had actually sent them the money as soon as they had sent a bill addressed to me with the dates. I pointed out if they kept doing this I would again take my complaint further.

They then contacted me via email saying they had worked out my bills incorrectly, which was why they sent the court summons leaflet.

The council tax department obviously don't believe that when people say they will take their complaint further they will because it is hard to find out who to complain to about council tax problems once you have complained to the department.

I then found a few other people including posters here have had problems with incorrectly calculated council tax bills and court summons remainders being sent to them.

So the thing to do is always:
1. Pay up as much as possible, and contact the council via email immediately.
2. If they don't respond within 10 working days and sort out the issue, make a written complaint via a letter to the Finance Director of that council.
3. If that doesn't work go to your local MP and make a complaint.


BTW I check my bank balance but no always the debits because the debits say for 5 days the word "debit" next to them so if the right amount of money has gone out days ago I don't check exactly where it has gone to.

adouglasmhor

Olly300 has some excellent point's there, I would add copy everything you send to the director of finance, to the convenor of the finance committee, sometimes that is just enough to get things moving.

uktim29

taxiphil wrote: »

I'd also advise the OP not to get too wound up by uktim29's comments. This is his hobby: lurking on the "Vent, Bent and Heaven Sent" board, always shouting down the complainant in every scenario, accusing them of being the guilty party and changing the facts of their cases, even though by the law of averages a great deal of those complaints will have been valid ones.

I don't quiet know where you get changing facts from? And I'm perfectly intitled to air my view like any other.

I see the hobbies of people here tend to be winging, going to the papers, sueing, seeing how many miss-priced items they can find in supermarkets. Then causing as much fuss that they can rather than simply pointing out to someone concerned and moving on. This is what 99% of the country manage to do. Hardly being a yes-man is it?

It's nice to see another poster wants to move further towards a blame culture, lets hope our courts still keep some common sense though (so this case would be unlikely to win). Imagine if we sued the council for everything that niggled us and the £10,000 a year council tax needed to pay for it. I already know the defense from people will be "no it won't, it'll stop them making mistakes" this coming from perfect Joe average who obviously never gets anything wrong and shouldn't even have to check their bank statements.

Poppy9

Cerro wrote: »

You took my quote completely out of context - if you had bothered to read you might have spotted:

I'm on MSE - you think I wouldn't bother to check my bank account? Of course I do, what I don't do is [SIZE=-1]scrutinise every single transaction[/SIZE] to make sure that someone has bothered to take a bill. Obviously something large would be easily spotted.

Looks to me like you are just using any excuse to blow your own trumpet. I might as well add I have never had an overdraft (even as a student), needed a loan or had any form of debt at all... never missed a single payment either and long may it continue. But if some bean counter at my local council failed to take money from me at the agreed time and then demanded I pay it all immediately and more or face legal action - I would feel somewhat aggrevied, much like how I imagine the OP feels now.

Do try and pay attention to what people post...

I do pay attention to what people post and you said

Cerro wrote:

The average Joe should not have to check his bank balance every month (not everyone gets paper statements you know) to make sure that some useless fool in the council has bothered to collect the monthly fee.

I'm saying you should. I think most people know the big amounts due out of their accounts, I count my council tax as one of the big amounts. I would know if it hadn't gone just as I would know if any of my other DD for over £100 were missing. I'm not blowing my own trumpet I am just taking responsibilty for my money.

Voyager2002

Cerro wrote: »

Councils hate bad publicity, so making a song and dance about it annoys them. Its nice to see them brought down a peg. Truth is, all councils are worse than useless! All they do is collect the rubbish (which they no longer seem willing to do weekly anymore) and patch the roads (when they are going to be busy) and they can't even get that right. They do however manage a good job of shuffling paper and wasting money - ensuring that they use up their entire budget so they can justify taxing us more next year.

You are forgetting a few other things that local government does. Like schools; policing; fire and rescue; social services. All of these services are paid for out of council tax.

Councils are very aware that they are spending public money, and so are under pressure to keep the salaries of the people they employ as low as possible. When I worked for a council, my colleagues were extremely competent and highly qualified, and knew that they could easily earn three times as much in the private sector. Some of them left (as I did), while those who remained did so because they understood the importance of the work they were doing. Obviously, I am talking about people who were responsible for strategic planning: when it comes to routine debt-collecting, the councils get the calibre of employee that low salaries attract. If you want your council tax collection to be of a five-star standard, then you have to pay five-star prices for it, and few people want that.

We generally get extremely good value for our council tax, but that mainly reflects the fact that it is far too low for the level of services that we receive for it. And certainly no private companies can provide this level of service for the budgets in question: most of the major disasters in local government have resulted from giving contracts to private companies, and they just cannot do the work for the money that is available.

Cerro

The point of that comment was that you should not have to check your bank balance on the basis that someone might not have the competance to debit your account - considering it is also an automated process you would have thought that it would be a relatively straight forward task, but even that seems beyond some council workers...

There are of course other reasons to be checking your bank balance but that should not be one of them.

Voyager2002

There is a very simple solution to the original problem. The OP needs to make a telephone call to the person in charge of Collections, explain what has happened, and allow the council to activate the direct debit.

I speak from experience, although my problems with council tax have actually been mostly my fault. In several places I have found that while the routine task of collecting tax is in the hands of poorly trained people, more intelligent and sympathetic (that is, better trained and better paid) people are in charge of 'chasing' late payments. Someone of this calibre will be pleased to arrange to take payments over a reasonable time-frame, and may even apologise for the original mistake.

As for the OP's determination to fight battles to put right the wrongs of the world, I applaud the sentiment. But why not choose an issue that really matters? Ultimately, your problem is really not important.