Council Tax Collection Facts

Posted By: William Hobhouse
Date Posted: 24/09/2007

Residents can be proud of their Council’s 99.5% Council Tax collection level. Of course, not all residents pay their Council Tax fully within the year. Those debts are recovered in the following months and years with legal action if necessary. Only a tiny amount (about £0.25 million) is finally written off and called bad debt.

The Council’s excellent performance wouldn’t be a cause for comment if it wasn’t for extraordinary attacks from Labour and Conservative Councillors. They are writing quotes like: ‘A Council that is inefficient, a Council where honest people are paying a surcharge for those who don’t pay, a Council that is grossly incompetent……’

Then there’s the voodoo economics, that somehow £0.25 bad debt write offs can pay for a 2% lower Council Tax (Conservative proposal, cost about £1.5 million) or for £3.35 million better services (Labour).

It’s easy to run the Council down, to snipe from the sidelines, to undermine Council morale and Council staff. How sad to see an orchestrated Labour and Conservative attack doing just that. Perhaps the most extraordinary thing is their ignorance. After all, 18 months ago, they were running the Council together.

The facts on Council Tax collection are:

In 2004/5 we billed £56.5 million and wrote off £0.25 million in bad debt. In 2005/6 we billed £59.28 million and wrote off £0.20 million in bad debt.
In 2006/7 we billed £62.05 million and wrote off £0.11 million in bad debt.
The forecast for 2007/8: we have billed £65.29 million, we expect to collect all but £2.94 million within the year, and expect to write off £0.25 million in bad debt. We expect to collect £2.0 million of outstanding bills.

Rochdale Council has written off £2.73 million in bad debt on Council Tax since 1993. In March 2007, the outstanding bills that the Council is in the process of collecting stood at £3.30 million. Taken together, Rochdale Council is performing better than Bolton, Manchester, Oldham, Salford, Stockport, Trafford and Wigan. Bury takes bronze, and Tameside takes the gold medal.

The Silver medal out of 10 in Greater Manchester for long term performance is a very good record.

If Rochdale Online readers would like a copy of the 5 year Council Tax Collection figures, and the comparison with other Greater Manchester Authorities, then please email me at william.hobhouse@rochdale.gov.uk