Council Tax: Non-payment
(asked on 13th January 2025) - View Source
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, whether her Department holds a demographic breakdown of people (a) sent to prison and (b) given suspended committal orders for non-payment of council tax in each year between 2019 and 2024.
Non-payment of council tax is not a criminal offence and cannot attract a custodial sentence. However, under the committal to prison process, a court order can provide for someone to be jailed for failing to pay a debt.
Committal to prison can only ever be the last resort for non-payment of council tax. Before a magistrates’ court commits someone to prison for failure to pay their council tax, it must have issued a “liability order” and the local authority must have (at least) tried and failed to take control of the debtor’s goods and sell them to recover the debt. Councils have additional powers of enforcement under a liability order, including deduction from earnings, deduction from benefit, charging orders on the property, and bankruptcy. If a council applies for committal to prison, the court must inquire into the debtor’s means, and the council must satisfy the court that there is no other effective method of collection and that failure to pay is due to wilful refusal or culpable neglect. This is to prevent persons who are genuinely unable to pay their council tax from being committed to prison. Where that is the case courts have the power to remit the debt.
Individuals in cases where there has been a committal to prison will not necessarily go to prison where payment is made. No individual has been admitted to prison for non-payment of council tax between 2019 and 2023. This can be viewed in Table 2.A.16: at the following link: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/662909f33b0122a378a7e602/Prison-receptions-2023.ods.
Data on the number of committals to prison and suspended committals to prison for council tax non-payment since 2019 can be found in the table below:
National | 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | Jan - Sept 2024 * |
Number cases of Committals to Prison for non-payment of council tax | 11 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 2 | 0 |
Number Cases of Suspended Committal Orders for non-payment of council tax | 395 | 66 | 15 | 24 | 19 | 13 |
Source: HMCTS management information Libra MIS |
The count is based upon a case completion date falling between the reporting period 1st January 2019 and the 30th September 2024 where the offence codes CT92501 "Complaint for council tax liability order"; CT92502 "Complaints for Council Tax Liability Order (Multiple Cases)"; CT92511 "Complaint for Council Tax Committal Application" and result codes CDIMPS "Suspended Committal Order"; CDIMPSF "Suspended Committal order further suspended"; CDLTI "Civil Debt etc Committal to Prison, Imprisonment (Effective Sentence)"; CW "UPD - Imprisonment in Default Subsequent to Imposition"; IMP "Imprisonment Effective"; and SC "UPD - Suspended imprisonment to enforce money owed" were applied. The data supplied is a count of cases. Libra is a case centric management system and as such the count is not a count of the number of defendants. |
* Data for 2024 in line with the official statistics. |
Although care is taken when processing and analysing the data, the details are subject to inaccuracies inherent in any large-scale case management system and is the best data that is available. |
Data are management information and are not subject to the same level of checks as official statistics. |
Data are taken from a live management information system and can change over time and for that reason might differ slightly from any previously published information. |
Data has not been cross referenced with case files. |
In 2018, the High Court issued a judgment in a case relating to imprisonment for non-payment of council tax. Following that judgment there has been a significant reduction in the number of committals and the number of suspended committals since 2019.
Wales abolished power to commit to prison on 1 April 2019, subject to some transitional provisions.
In the data held centrally, we do not have data on the demographics of the people who are the subject of these cases.