Politics: the coming onslaught

By Richard North - March 25, 2023

One of the more unpleasant features of the domestic energy price hike is rarely given enough prominence by the media or the politicians. And that is the very simple premise (hence the difficulty in coming to terms with it) that bills – to misquote Shakespeare – come not single spies, but in battalions.

However, there is also a matter of timing. Just as the winter onslaught of the predatory energy companies has exerted its worst effect, hard-pressed household now have to face the combined onslaught of water charges and the much more expensive partner, the annual council tax bill – on top of all the other routine bills they must pay.

To give it its due, The Times did at least give some coverage to the coming onslaught, with its front page lead yesterday proclaiming: “Council tax tops £2,000 in triple squeeze on bills”, adding the sub-heading which spread the gloomy news: “Average rise of £99 a year as rates increase and crisis payments end”.

Giving substance and context to the headline, the paper goes on to inform us that households “are facing more financial pain”, pointing to increased mortgage bills and the end of cost of living payments for energy bills, which are coinciding with the average council tax for the first time exceeding £2,000.

Looking at the issue dispassionately, one can have a certain amount of sympathy for local authorities who rely on the council tax for part of their funding. Even discounting the inherent efficiencies and waste in much council spending, they have an impossible task.

Their particular problem is in having to fund the social care system, where costs and demand are spiralling out of control while income is nowhere near close to plugging gaping holes in council finances. Elected members and officials both are faced with the worst off all possible worlds, where they are forced to increase charges while cutting back on key public services.

That said, the system is such that local authorities are visiting their own problems on their own local taxpayers and, in the way of things show little quarter to those who cannot pay.

In the round, council tax arrears are one of the fastest growing debt problems experienced in the community and, faced with increasingly difficult recovery, local authorities have become by far the largest users of bailiff services in the country.

Only to a certain extent, though, does this reflect the greater difficulties in debt recovery. While local authorities are supposed to use bailiffs as the last resort – like the utilities in their enthusiasm for installing prepayment meters – almost to a man they are lying bastards and send them in at the first opportunity, paying lip-service to the legal requirements.

But there are several aspects to this system which are particularly pernicious. The first is that, although dealing with bailiffs could be a quite civilised affair, as I wrote back in 2011, the system changed in that year when my local council made its own bailiffs redundant and outsourced debt collection to a private firm.

The business model for these firms, as we saw with the prepayment meter scam, is to employ dregs on minimum wage, and to incentivise them with bonuses to run roughshod through the law in their bids to reach a living wage.

At the time, bailiff fees – set by statute – were quite low, so low that legitimate debt recovery was not really a commercial proposition. But the bailiffs and their employers got round this quite easily by inventing chargeable visits (so-called ghost visits), and then by inflating fees far beyond those officially authorised.

Those who were unwary enough to give these scum any money would find the fees deducted from their payments, with only the balance remitted to the council. Debtors were thus finding that, to clear the debt, they were paying several hundred pounds more than they actually owed.

Needless to say, the council did not respond to complaints, the bailiff companies stonewalled and lied, and the police weren’t interested. In fact, the police often actively assisted the bailiffs in breaking the law.

I recall once going down to Bradford central police station to make a complaint, complete with documentary evidence of how the bailiffs had broken the law, only to be told to my face by the duty inspector to “fuck off”. My formal complaint in writing also got me nowhere, even when I took it to the Police Complaints Authority (now the Independent Office for Police Conduct).

As an aside, for those who are currently obsessing about the state of London’s Metropolitan Police, there is one simple failure which lies at the heart of the problem – the complaints system doesn’t work. For low-level complaints (which means most of them), the police investigate themselves and if you go to the supposedly independent body, they simply refer the complaint back to the force against which you are lodging the complaint.

And, although at the time, I had many political contacts, I could not get any MPs interested, and while I got Booker to report some of the worst excesses, nothing come of any of this either.

As to the low level of the bailiff fees, in 2013 as part of a package of supposed “reforms”, the Ministry of Justice resolved this problem by the simple expedient of raising the basic fees for a visit from £24.50 to an eye-watering £235 plus a percentage of any debt owed over £1,500. A compliant parliament approved these increases on the nod.

Although this was aimed at reduced the level of abuse, it had little effect. In 2022, the MoJ completed a review of the 2014 “reforms” and published its findings.

Its report refers to instances where individual respondents and MPs reported that bailiffs were acting in an intimidating manner, causing alarm or distress. But crucially, responses from the advice sector reported that 256 of 308 advisors surveyed felt that the level of problems had stayed the same or got worse since 2014.

Even some bailiffs themselves cried foul, recalling that they were sometimes prevented from agreeing repayment plans by local authorities who required agents to enforce warrants with payment in full immediately.

Nevertheless, the MoJ blandly remarked that “the low volume of formal complaints” did not support the view that problems were widespread, although it did concede that the low level may be “due to barriers which deter people from making a complaint”, thus acknowledging that “the volume of formal complaints was lower than the true number of issues experienced”.

Thus, when yesterday the Guardian headlined that “Most of the 2m people in England and Wales contacted by bailiffs report intimidating behaviour”, together with the Independent, this should have come as no surprise to the MoJ. They already know there is a problem, as do the local authorities who knowingly use a corrupt system. They simply don’t care as long as it brings in the money.

Furthermore, most of the public knows there is a problem. In February 2019, The Times was reporting: “Public ‘demand rogue bailiffs be locked out’”. “Locked up” would be more appropriate, but still these scum walk free.

When it comes to the other pernicious aspects of this system, however, the most obvious is that council tax is regressive, which means that people on lower incomes pay a higher proportion of their incomes than people who are better off. Thus, largely, the bailiffs are tasked with preying on the poor.

But there is also a regional disparity. Those in the North pay a higher tax proportionate to their property values, with the residents of Westminster enjoying the lowest burden in the country. Multi-millionaire Rishi Sunak wins on both counts.

The worst feature of all, though, is that although imprisonment for debt was abolished in 1869, this does not apply to council tax. If you manage to evade the rapacious bailiffs (which is not too hard if you know what you are doing), refusal to pay gets you arrested and sent to prison – for which no defence or mitigation can be pleaded. The sentence is automatic, and the judge has no discretion.

This actually puts life in Britain into a different perspective. We are not free men or women. We are simply out on license, free only for as long as we pay our annual Danegeld to the local authority.

In 2011, I was paying £1,135.33 Danegeld. This year, as The Times notes, I will be charged over £2,000. The prisons may be so full this year that they’ll be discharging real criminals to make room for council tax defaulters.