Council bosses write off more than £1m debts

Families will not be pursued for emergency accommodation costs

More than £1 million worth of debt owed by former homeless families in Perth and Kinross has been written off by council chiefs.

The sum, which has been growing for the last eight years, comes from charges for emergency temporary accommodation.

Letters are sent out to tenants in arrears after 14 days, with threats of court action if still unpaid after seven weeks.

But in many cases, the money was not recovered because the debtor didn’t have the funds to pay it back.

Otherwise, people have simply moved away and cannot be found, or they have had their debts prescribed.

Almost all of the outstanding money is recovered from the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP). About 93% of £25 million worth of charges was successfully claimed by authority officers.

Perth councillor Dave Doogan said the figures suggest more could be done to help homeless tenants who don’t have government support.

“There is a tension which exists in the way we cost our homeless service, the bulk of which is recovered from the DWP,” he said.

“It has become a serious situation for people who aren’t DWP claimants, but are homeless, who end up paying a high price for their temporary council accommodation.

“It is maybe worth asking housing service officers to look again at how we treat self-funding homeless clients.”

Perth and Kinross Council’s head of finance, John Symon, said: “The writeoff is in relation to all of the outstanding debt in this category, right up to this financial year.

“It has been reviewed and was considered to be appropriate for a write-off at this stage.”

He said: “A new write-off procedure was approved in November and offers more flexibility and enables debts to be written off on a more timely basis.”

The council has also agreed to writeoff nearly £500,000 of overdue council tax and £97,620 of parking fines.

Council leader Ian Campbell said: “The council takes debt collection and recovery very seriously and we perform well in a number of key areas.

“For example, we have the best record in the country for collecting council tax.”

He said: “Inevitably, despite rigorous recovery processes, some debt cannot be collected for a variety of reasons and it has to be written off.

“However, even when the debts are written off, the files are not closed and every effort is made to collect outstanding debt wherever possible.”

Council leader Ian Campbell says debt files will not be closed.