A new name has to be added to the list of entrepreneurs making a living out of 'checking' whether people are still entitled to a 'single person discount' which does not exist and which therefore the council has no business to be checking. This is called a 'single person discount review' and a 'single occupant discount'. The firm involved this time is called 'capacityGRID' and unless is it stupider than Experian it will have written conditions in the contract making the council fully responsible in case of various mess ups.
The good people of Dumfries and Galloway have not taken this crap lying down. Indeed, the whole business made the BBC News. The news editor might be worth contacting if you have suffered with these pernicious reviews in your part of the country.
This reminds me that Audit Scotland, fooled by legally inaccurate guidance provided to it by the Audit Commission years ago, insists that some people are receiving a discount 'on the basis' that they literally live alone, which is just as false in Scotland as it is in England.
They pulled the same trick in Scotland as they have considered pulling here if need be, and are doing at the very moment: they told Parliament that they used 'data matching' to identify inconsistencies, got the Scottish Parliament to give them the power to write their own code of data matching practice, and then produced one from which all references to inconsistencies had been surgically removed. This sort of thing cannot be accident or coincidence. It has to be part of a deliberate strategy.
This is a Scottish council, but the law is more or less word for word the same as the English Law.
As happens with come councils, the council claims to be ascertaining whether any discount should apply, and if you don't reply to their letter, they take it as
'confirmation that your circumstances have changed and your single occupant discount will be removed.'
The point here is that a 'single occupant discount' can still apply if your circumstances have changed. Only if a new resident isn't in one of the disregard categories will entitlement to your dsicount change.
Watch the statistics carefully. We know that councils claim 'additional' income in cases where an ICT code which misrepresents the legal position of taxpayers has been changed and no additional income of any sort identified.
The BBC web site quotes somebody from the council as referring to this discount as a 'benefit' which is irksome. They also claim that the council has a 'statutory duty' to review discounts, a piece of equivocal nonsense, as the duty to which it refers is not a duty to 'review' anything, but a duty to ascertain whether ANY discount applies and if so the amount of that discount. There is and can be no statutory duty to 'review' a discount which is a figment of the mind of some moron looking at an ICT screen and misunderstanding what he sees there. Nothing about this is legal in terms of data protection. The problem is that you have to be able to sue the council which involves being rich to get anything done about it.