A SOMERSET council has written off more than £600,000 in uncollected council tax, business rates and other debts,  in the past year.

Sedgemoor District Council publishes reports every three months of how much revenue it has failed to collect from ratepayers and businesses in Bridgwater, Highbridge, Burnham-on-Sea and the wider district.

In a number of cases, the council has been unable to recover the money because the legal cost of pursuing the debt is higher than the debt itself.

The council has said that it has a good record of collecting revenue and that the percentage of council tax collected has risen slightly on the previous year.

The council’s executive committee met in Bridgwater on Wednesday morning (April 25) to approve the writing off of debts for the last three months of the financial year, having previously taken reports on the matter in January and in July and October 2017.

Any individual debt of £4,000 or more which cannot be recovered has to be signed off by the council, while any amount lower than this can be done by a delegated officer.

In the past three months of 2017/18, the council signed off £217,183.51 of debt, with the largest proportions being unpaid council tax or unpaid rent.

By contrast, in the past three months of 2016/17, this amount was much lower – £116,103.16, of which around £41,000 came from unpaid council tax.

When the previous reports are taken into account, the total written off rises to £626,832.81 – around four times the salary of the Prime Minister.

This total would have been higher still if the council’s revenue team hadn’t recovered more than £58,000 over a 12-month period.

But it still amounts to around 0.5 per  cent of the council’s total collected revenue – money which could have gone to fund front-line services.

Interim revenues manager Donna Griffin stated in her written report that the proportion of council tax collected by March 30 had risen by 0.17 per cent compared to the previous year, a trend which she described as “very positive”.

She added: “We collect more than £139million each year, made up of £69.7million in council tax, £42.4million in business rates, £15.3million in rents and £12.5million of sundry debts.

“We take prompt and effective action where debts are unpaid, but it is inevitable that there will be an element of bad debt.”

There are five reasons why the council either cannot or will not try to recover debts:

  • The debtor has absconded or left no forwarding address (and therefore cannot be traced)
  • The debtor has died
  • The debt is “uneconomic to pursue” (i.e. the cost of recovering the debt is higher than the debt itself)
  • The debtor is insolvent or bankrupt
  • Other reasons, such as disputed evidence or the debtor having insufficient assets.

 Councillor Dawn Hill said that “it hasn’t been easy” to recover the money and praise the work of the revenue team, stating: “This is the thing that keeps up ticking over.”

Council leader Duncan McGinty said that the portion lost was “very small” compared to the total revenue of the council, adding: “We have been very successful in recovering old debt.”