Local Government Finance Bill
Debate between Lord Smith of Leigh and Lord Lucas
Lord Lucas
My Lords, my experience of this comes entirely from the bailiff end of things and in particular from the complaints that people make when the bailiffs come through. The complaints are not necessarily about the bailiffs but about the process that has led to them finding the bailiffs at the door. The level of liability or of the charges is a matter of public record, as is their volume. The policy of councils to make the whole debt due immediately if there is a failure over a couple of months to pay instalments is there on council websites. Both of them are fundamental injustices. The council may be good-hearted in the way that it deals with things. I do not have data on which councils are good or bad; I am merely looking at the overall practice, and I am conscious of the level of complaint and anguish that reaches those who deal with complaints against bailiffs, which is where my understanding comes from.
However, coming back to the basic figures, if you charge £100 for a liability order, it seems to me that you are grossly overcharging, and if you say on your website, as councils do, that if you miss a couple of payments the whole lot is due, that is a fundamentally mistaken way to deal with debt. I therefore like this amendment because I read it as putting some of the onus back on councils, which is where it should be.
Lord Smith of Leigh
I thank the noble Lord for setting that out. However, I really cannot accept the two points that he is making, certainly as they apply to my council. First, the cost may well be averaging £100 but that is because of the care that local authorities take in individual cases. They are not simply sending huge numbers of debts to courts or getting orders. Each case has to be looked at properly to make sure of it.
The noble Lord’s second point is, in a sense, a misunderstanding. Essentially, there is a contract between a local resident and the council to pay the council tax. The council says it will withdraw that contract only if the payment has not been received and the resident has not informed the council of a change in their circumstances. If residents come back to councils—certainly to mine—to explain their circumstances, we negotiate a new form of payment. If we did not have that provision, people would simply not inform the council and they would not pay on time—and the costs would be even higher than they are.