Councils write off £32m in council tax over five years

LOCAL authorities in Wales have written off more than £32m in council tax payments due from residents in just five years.

In total, the 22 councils across the country have scrapped payments worth £32.6m across the past five full financial years.

Last year alone the cost of unpaid council tax written off by authorities topped £6.5m.

The authority which wrote off the most council tax in 2017-18 was Wrexham, with a total of £922,000. The council wrote off £285,000 more in 2017-18 than it did the year before.

Wales’ most populated area, Cardiff, wrote off the second-highest amount, with £743,000 written off over the past financial year – though this was £365,000 less than the financial year before.

The amount written off by all Welsh authorities varies each year but the average over the past five full financial years is more than £6.5m annually.

In 2013-14 the total amount was £6.7m, which fell in 2014-15 to £6m. The following year the bill for written off council tax across Wales hit £7m.

It dropped to £6.4m in 2016-17 then rose slightly in 2017-18 to £6.5m.

In 2017-18 authorities in Wales collected 97.4% of council tax billed, an increase of 0.1 of a percentage point – the highest collection rate since the introduction of council tax. The total amount collected – as of March 31, 2018 – was £87m. They collected £27m of arrears.

A Wrexham council spokeswoman said: “The amount written off may have been in the financial year 2017-18 but it covered amounts of much older debts from previous years.

“Wrexham makes every possible effort to ensure that council tax debts are collected and as such does not write off as a matter of course. The larger amount in 2017-18 is a result of a thorough review of older debts, particularly those over six years old, in order to concentrate our collection resources on the more recent amounts owing.

“Wrexham council tax collection rate remains above the Wales average.”