Summary: Mr X complains the Council has not dealt properly with his Council Tax charges. The Council is at fault because it has failed to collect his Council Tax properly and has sent him incorrect demands for payment resulting in enforcement action being taken. Mr X suffered avoidable distress and had to unnecessarily had to spend time addressing multiple errors. The Council has apologised and offered to pay Mr X £200. The Council has agreed to apologise for further errors, pay Mr X a further £200 for additional avoidable distress and £100 for his time and trouble, make an application to Court to set aside a liability order and review its systems/processes.

The complaint

1. The complainant, whom I shall refer to as Mr X, complains the Council has not dealt properly with his Council Tax charges, because it has:
• Made errors in its payment demands, for which it has already accepted fault;
• unnecessarily obtained a liability order in respect of those errors;
• continued to make errors and send incorrect Council Tax bills.
2. Mr X says this has caused him and his wife avoidable distress, has caused them to incur costs and may affect his credit rating.

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The Ombudsman’s role and powers

3. We investigate complaints about ‘maladministration’ and ‘service failure’. In this statement, I have used the word fault to refer to these. We must also consider whether any fault has had an adverse impact on the person making the complaint. I refer to this as ‘injustice’. If there has been fault which has caused an injustice, we may suggest a remedy. (Local Government Act 1974, sections 26(1) and 26A(1), as amended)
4. If we are satisfied with an organisation’s actions or proposed actions, we can complete our investigation and issue a decision statement. (Local Government Act 1974, section 30(1B) and 34H(i), as amended)

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How I considered this complaint

5. I spoke to Mr X about his complaint and considered documents he provided. I made enquiries of the Council and considered its response and the supporting documents it provided.
6. Mr X and the Council had an opportunity to comment on my draft decision. I considered any comments received before making a final decision.

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What I found

What happened?

7. This is a brief chronology of key events. It does not contain everything I reviewed during my investigation.
8. The Council made a payment agreement with Mr X for outstanding Council Tax from 2019/20.
9. The Council did not collect payments according to this payment plan and then took enforcement action against Mr X, including obtaining a liability order.
10. Mr X complained to the Council. The Council upheld his complaint that payments had not been collected according to the plan.
11. Mr X escalated his complaint and said the Council had not answered all the points raised in his complaint. The Council agreed and upheld Mr X’s stage 2 complaint.
12. The Council offered Mr X £100 compensation. It later agreed to request the Magistrates Court to set aside the liability order and increased the compensation offered to Mr X to £200.
13. Mr X says there have been further errors on his Council Tax account in 2023.

Analysis

14. The Council accepts that:
• Payments were not collected according to the payment plan agreed with Mr X;
• Enforcement action was unnecessarily taken as a result;
• It did not fully respond to Mr X at stage one of its complaints process;
• It has sent incorrect correspondence regarding Mr X’s Council Tax account on multiple occasions; and
• There have been further errors since Mr X’s complaint to the Ombudsman.
15. This is fault by the Council. Mr X and his wife have suffered avoidable distress and had to spend time and trouble repeatedly dealing with the errors.
16. I have seen an email to Mr X which states, “Please note that is not standard practice for us to make an application to the Court for the liability order to be set aside as it is not necessary. However, this has now been requested..” This message clearly implies that an application to Court to set aside the liability order had been made.
17. I have seen evidence that the Council requested the Magistrates Court to set aside the liability order against Mr X, although received no response. This was by way of an informal email request, not a formal application to Court. This is fault by the Council. Mr X was led to believe the Council had done something which in fact it had not.
18. The existence of a liability order against Mr X does not in any way impact on his credit profile. As a result, the only continuing injustice caused to Mr X by this is further avoidable distress.

Action by the Council

19. The Council has taken the following action. It has:
• Upheld Mr X’s complaints;
• Withdrawn the recovery action against him;
• Set up a new payment plan to properly collect his Council Tax;
• Offered him £200 compensation;
• Investigated the further errors noted in paragraph 14 above. It identified that compensation from a previous complaint to the Ombudsman was affected Mr X’s Council Tax account. It has corrected this error to ensure it does not happen again.
20. I do not consider the remedy offered by the Council to be sufficient because:
• Further errors have occurred after Mr X was offered £200 compensation.

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Agreed action

21. To remedy the outstanding injustice caused by the fault I have identified, the Council has agreed to take the following action within 4 weeks of this decision:
• Apologise to Mr X for the further errors on his Council Tax account which occurred since he complained;
• Pay Mr X a total of £400, (inclusive of the £200 already offered), in respect of avoidable distress;
• Pay Mr X £100, in respect of time and trouble;
• Make a Formal Application to the Court to set aside the Liability Order and provide Mr X with a copy of that Application and to subsequently provide Mr X with the resulting Court Order which sets aside the original Liability Order; and
• Review its systems and processes to ensure that the problem of payments/compensation being applied to a Council Tax account cannot impact negatively on any other person liable for Council Tax, as it did for Mr X.
22. The Council should provide us with evidence it has complied with the above actions.

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Final decision

23. I have found fault by the Council, which caused injustice to Mr X. I have now completed my investigation.

Investigator’s decision on behalf of the Ombudsman

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Investigator's decision on behalf of the Ombudsman