I am writing to you under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 to request the following information:
1. Which enforcement agent or agents does your council employ for matters involving council debts?
Devon County Council have not used enforcement agents
2. How many court summons have your council issued in the following years: so far in 2023/24; 2022/23; 2021/22; 2020/21; 2019/ 2020; 2018/ 19?
We do not hold a central record of this information. Summons have been issued by in house solicitors during this time period. To extract this information would therefore require a manual review of every file held, some of the files are paper files and some of the files are electronic by our in house solicitors which covers the time period request. The in house legal team deal with a variety of different legal matters and each file would need to be checked to ascertain whether summons have been files or not. There are far in excess of 200 files which would require an manual check of each file, to find, search an gather the information would take in an average of 10 minutes a file which would take in excess of 33 hours. This would take longer than the appropriate time limit of 18 hours and, pursuant to section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000, we are therefore not obliged to provide this information.
3. How many times have enforcement agents visited the homes of constituents on behalf of the council for the purpose of debt collection for the following years: so far in 2023/24; 2022/23; 2021/22; 2020/21; 2019/ 2020; 2018/ 19?
4. For those who have been visited please provide an anonymised breakdown of demographics in the categories of household income and race of occupants.
In response to questions 3 and 4, please refer to our response to question 1
5. Has the council carried out any quality impact assessments on debt collection services? If so, would I be able to request access to this document?
6. How many complaints have been made to your council due to actions taken by enforcement agents in the following years: so far in 2023/24; 2022/23; 2021/22; 2020/21; 2019/ 2020; 2018/ 19?
In response to questions 5 and 6, as enforcement agents and debt collection services have not been used, no quality impact assessments have been required and no complaints have been received