London Borough of Havering

The 2011 Audit Commission Annual Report states that Havering targeted 'high risk' discount cases. It states this as a matter of praise, despite the Commission denying that it ever identified people as 'high risk' fraud cases itself.


This raises the question of whether Havering has joined the ranks of those councils who are improperly administering the tax and identifying people as 'high risk' cases on the basis of fictitious discrepancies in line with the legally inaccurate guidance on the Audit Commission's secret web site.


The web site of the council appears to support a view that it is not complying with the law. It certainly provides misleading information to taxpayers.  For example, this assertion appears:

The full council tax is based on two or more adults living in your property. If you are the only adult occupier you can claim a 25% discount. You may also be able to claim a discount if you live with someone else as some people are not counted for council tax purposes.


This implies that there are two different discounts: the sole occupier discount and the disregard discount.  It also implies that the legal position of the taxpayer is that he or she is 'claiming' one or the other.


A second council tax page is somewhat hard to follow as whoever produced it put full stops in the middle of sentences.  But it lists disregards separately from the 'single person discount', while making no mention of the statutory assumptions on which the bill is calculated and issued.


A third page lists disregard discounts as a separate sort of discount, and lists two kinds of disregard discount, depending upon how many people are disregarded.  The page is very badly presented, with spelling and other mistakes, but includes the following misleading information:


As well as SRD 25% discount & 2nd Home discounts (class B) 10% discount the following 14 discounts can also be awarded – these will either be SRD with disregard(s) or disregarded person(s) only in the property. If all but one resident are disregarded a 25% discount will be awarded


It would appear that the London Borough of Havering cannot distinguish between a disregard category and a discount 'type'. 


CT discount application forms would appear to be an ideal place for councils to discharge their legal duties to provide clear information to residents.   Havering does not provide an application form written in good English, leave alone providing clear and legally accurate information.   


Havering has chosen to use their forms to provide misleading information. 

Before I can reduce your bill, I need to have written confirmation that you live alone. Could you please complete the attached declaration and return it to me, along with this letter in the envelope provided.

It will be necessary for me to review the situation in the future, but you should let me know if your circumstances change in the meantime.


Havering is misleading its residents here.  What the discount recipient should do by law is far more limited: as readers will know, he or she must let the council know if there is no longer any entitlement to a 25% discount.  It is not correct in law that they must let the CT department know if their circumstances 'change in the meantime'. 


Havering has an 'annual notification' section on its web site, but this does not contain the information required by law to be provided in each demand notice, though it provides some of the information required by law to be provided with each demand notice.


The council also publishes an annual 'Your Council Tax Your Services' leaflet on line.  Presumably this is the leaflet which counts as part of the demand notice and which may contain the information on discounts required by law.  Does it state the obligation of the taxpayer correctly? No.


Instead it contains a false assertion similar to that on the initial application letter.

Please note that this is only a summary of the discounts that are available; for full 

details or to apply, please contact Customer Services. Any existing discount entitlement 

is shown on your bill but you must tell the Council within 21 days about any changes of 

circumstances that may affect it or you may be subject to a fine.

The council is failing to provide the information which the law clearly says it must provide about the duty arising under Regulation 16 and is replacing it with inaccurate information coupled with a threat. 





The leaflet also fails to provide enough information about the steps to take in cases where there is disagreement about a discount: it merely asks the person to phone the council.  There is a right to appeal, to a valuation tribunal if need be.


In conclusion, once again we have the NFI praising a council which is not conducting its affairs properly and in accordance with the law, and which is putting out incorrect information and demanding that taxpayers provide third party information voluntarily by threatening them with penalties which it has no power at all to inflict.  


Well done to the NFI.

The mess hits the Guardian and Bob Neill writes in to comment

In December 2011, Miles Brignall, consumer affairs writer at the Guardian, wrote an article entitled 'The Council Tax Shock of Living Alone'.


http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2011/dec/16/council-tax-shock-single-person-discount?INTCMP=SRCH


The article, published in a series dealing with unfair and irrational treatment of consumers, deals with the distress experienced by a Bristol resident at the hands of her local council, acting on the basis of what one might rather loosely call 'information' provided by credit reference agency Experian.

The victim on this occasion was Sarah Dodds, a semi-retired civil servant, who, ironically, used to work helping to catch people who were committing benefit fraud.  This just shows that no matter how responsible your past or impeccable your references and reputation, you get caught up in this mess.

Ms Dodds' experience mirrors my own: first she received a distressing letter, in her case demanding £3,000 in back paid tax, and then she was informed by council staff that they suspected her making a fraudulent claim for the discount.  Fraud, put briefly, consists of dishonestly making a false representation with the intention of making a gain or causing loss or risk of loss to another or of failing to declare information required by law.

It would appear that the council did not find it necessary to produce any evidence to support this suspicion.  This is partly because the whole matter was dealt with under civil powers.  Put simply, councils do not require evidence.

In a crucial passage, the journalist exposes the fact that Experian have been grading people according to alleged potential risk that they might be thieves.   It is apparently on this basis that the council suspected Ms Dodds of fraud and issued with her with a backdated adjusted demand notice.

The law requires the council to inform all residents of their right to appeal against a decision on discounts to a valuation tribunal. It seems that the council failed to inform Ms Dodds of this right, and it refused to discuss the matter with the journalist either.  On this basis, Ms Dodds would appear to have grounds for complaint to the Local Government Ombudsman.  Councils should provide clear and fair information and should not cause distress by failing to provide it.  But as all too many of us know, once they suspect you of fraud, they treat you like dirt.  Moreover, whoever was handling the case may have been a temp hired in for the purpose, with a limited brief and no background knowledge in any of the relevant tax law.

The council refused to send anybody round to inspect Ms Dodds' home, which, she felt would demonstrate that no other person lived there.  Its actions appear to speak complete indifference to the distress and reputation of a person whose life has been spent protecting the public purse.  It stated 'adamantly' that unless Mrs Dodds could tell them where her son lived it would insist on her paying their backdated demand.  Mrs Dodds says she does not know and as they are on bad terms she has not been able to find out.  This mirrors similar cases where marriages have dissolved on bad terms and the partner remaining in the house does not know where the other now lives. In such cases, some councils do simply refuse to believe the remaining partner and issue bills for the full amount.

The other point relating to an appeal is, of course, as I have pointed out, that when a council suspects you of fraud or assumes that you are a thief, and uses civil methods to recover money it thinks you have stolen there is no appeal against the criminal 'charge' as no formal charge is ever brought.  Yet the fact that you have been suspected of that offence becomes marketable data, which may be sold to and by, yes, you guessed it, credit reference agencies.

The trigger for all this appears not to have been the electoral register, but the fact that bank statements and other letters to Ms Dodds' estranged son were still being sent to his mother's address.  This is the data from which the council derived its conclusions that his mother was probably a thief.

An Experian spokesperson appears to have given an account of the matter which is misleading in terms of council tax law, as it asserts that the legal position of Ms Dodds at the time it did its data matching was that she was 'claiming to live alone'.  This would not have been the case.  I put this down to simple ignorance on the part of Experian, but this drip drip of misleading information does nothing to clarify matters and serves only to further sling mud at innocent people.

Indeed, the article was commented upon by a number of people all to happy to mentally convict not just Ms Dodds but also the estranged son of fraud on the basis that he ought to be paying council tax but is not. Nobody has established that he is not paying council tax, or that he is liable to  pay council tax. Of course, even if his sole or main residence was with his estranged mother he would still not necessarily be liable to pay the tax: clearly it is she who must pay it.

Residence in terms of council tax discount law is sole or main residence. The law clearly acknowledges that a person may have more than one residence but they only count as living at one of these for council tax purposes.

Experian's web site states that if another person is 'linked' with your address they may be able to break this link if you contact them.  There is however nothing wrong with having another person 'linked' with your address through data bases: it is not a crime and it certainly does not establish that your home is their sole or main residence.

But as we have seen time and time again evidence has nothing to do with it.

Brignall notes that some councils use Northgate, who appear to be subcontractors who obtain contracts from councils and then purchase data matching from Experian. Experian regard this as a significant part of their business; in other words they make a lot of money from it.  I obtained a copy of the contract between them and my council and it had disclaimers all over it so that nobody caused distress or injustice could go after Experian: the council takes full responsibility.

Brignall mentions Lincolnshire and Rushmoor as two other councils running similar exercises. I shall check whether their web sites contain the almost routine misinformation about council tax discounts.

He also asserts that councils are allowed to contract out the job of checking entitlement to discounts. I do not know where he derived this wording, but what they are allowed to contract out is the legal duty to ascertain, once every year, whether any discount should apply and if so the amount of that discount.

It was certain that this mess would hit the national papers.  Ms Dodds is clearly intelligent and articulate enough to get her case aired in the national press. The majority of victims of it are not.

Bob Neill, at the time Undersecretary of State at the Department of Communities and Local Government saw fit to comment that people should not be deterred from claiming their discounts and explaining how these discounts worked. He also emphasised that councils ought to provide reliable information.

But as my research shows, almost no councils do, and those using firms like Experian and Capita seem to be amongst the worst of the bunch.