Local authorities expect half of poor residents to refuse to pay council tax
I have to admit to knowing nothing of this element of changes to the benefit regime. I fear it will have a particularly negative impact on rural authorities which as a whole rely more heavily on the council tax component of their funding than other councils. The article tells us:
Local authorities have conceded that up to half of people on low incomes will refuse to pay council tax after being caught in the net by benefit changes next year, and that there is little they can do about it.
Under coalition plans to reduce council tax benefits 2 million low-income workers will face an average bill of £247 a year from April – a charge from which they are currently exempt.
But the sums are so small – on average less than £5 a week – that councils are warning it “would in many cases be uneconomic to recover, with the costs of collection, including legal recovery costs, being higher than the bill”. The result is that councils are budgeting for large losses and potentially leaving the door open to widespread non-payment.
A series of freedom of information requests by False Economy, a campaigning group part-funded by trade unions, found that the two dozen councils that responded were resigned to seeing swaths of residents refusing to pay the tax.