1. What is the total value of council-related debts (such as council tax, parking fines, failures to pay business rates and housing arrears) referred to external enforcement agencies? Please provide for the financial years 2021/2022, 2022/2023 and 2023/2024 (up to 07/02/2024).
2021/2022 – £621,734 (gross value)
2022/2023 – £689,396 (gross value)
2023/2024 (up to 31/01/24) – £356,365 (gross value)
The figures above relate to parking enforcement. This question has been interpreted to relate to the debts mentioned within the brackets of the question. For information relating to other debts, please contact the District and Unitary councils who will hold information in relation to council tax etc.
2. How much was recovered by external debt agencies in each financial year?
2021/2022 -£156,064
2022/2023 – £231,110
2023/2024 (up to 31/01/24) – £98,003
3. In each financial years, how many complaints were received about the conduct of external bailiffs and debt collectors?
Compliance with this request would exceed the appropriate cost limit under Section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 which is £450 or 18 hours of officer time. The Council does not have an email category for debt collectors within the customer relations team mailbox. Therefore, to find and extract the requested information, a manual search of all complaints categorised into Corporate and Highways would be required. Since April 2021, there have been 4595 emails, each one of these would need to be reviewed to ascertain if it was within scope of the request. At a minimum of 2 minutes to review each email, it would take over 150 hours to find and extract the relevant information.
Under the Act, there is a duty to provide advice and assistance as to how a request can be refined to fit within the appropriate limit. Unfortunately, due to the way the data is held, this is not possible for this request.