Birmingham Council went bankrupt and accelerated its debt recovery to collect council tax and other fines by 500% between 2022 and 2023. It was revealed under the Freedom of Information Request. Other councils throughout the United Kingdom also use enforcement agents to recover unpaid debts since many are overstretched with their finances. To highlight the severity of this issue in this month's podcast on Debt Talk, Ripon Ray explored: 'Council finance, tax & debt recovery’. To assist him with the subject, Helen Ganney from Christians Against Poverty explained the challenges the debt advice sector faces in negotiating with some councils when many clients have insufficient funds to pay council tax debts and are in a deficit budget. Yet, there have been challenges with them and their agents to accept minimal payment or to hold enforcement action. She emphasised that many of these agents focus on collecting debts whilst not considering whether some residents can afford to pa...

(February 2023) In this month’s podcast on Debt Talk, Ripon Ray explored the current landscape for councils to recover council tax. Since the introduction of welfare reform over ten years ago, nearly every councils in the UK expect some forms of contributions from households regardless of many households were deemed too poor to pay prior to the introduction of the reform. At the same time, Britain has seen an increase in the recovery of council tax through the Magistrates' Courts. While the number of households in arrears has increased throughout the country, there has been a surge in the use of civil enforcement agents to recover priority debt. To explore this month’s topic, Ripon Ray spoke with panelists from the debt enforcement and debt advice sector to explore the current framework in which councils work and ways council tax has been recovered. Samantha Nurse  - Founder and CEO of Money Advice Hub spoke about the way councils throughout the UK charge council tax and the way th...