COLLECTING late council tax doesn't often bring popularity, but there are ways to recover overdue money without making enemies in the process. The same methods can also improve returns.
If councils are to benefit fully from local taxation, alternatives to punitive measures such as using sheriff officers and legal proceedings should be considered.
A failing of traditional recovery methods is that those in arrears are not treated
as individuals, but as numbers in the "default" column to be balanced.
This model assumes non-payers won't pay, but the real problem may be that they can't pay.
Taking a more bespoke approach pays dividends, both in terms of arrears recovered and local authorities' relationships with the public.
Letters and phone calls still have their place in bringing arrears to the attention but nothing compares to face-to-face contact.
This was proven when BCW Group piloted a programme with South Lanarkshire Council, which wanted to take a different approach to recovering its council tax arrears. It was important to ensure that both parties worked closely together, and so a partnership and information-sharing approach was adopted, with staff sharing offices, systems sharing data and payments reconciled between the two organisations.
Central to the success of the operation was a change in the culture of debt recovery. Focusing on the reasons for customers falling into arrears led to new processes being put in place to take this into account; a strategy that has repeatedly yielded results in BCW's work across the public and private sectors.
In South Lanarkshire, more emphasis has been placed on dealing with late or non-payers as customers in difficulty, rather than unwilling to pay. Additional education and training has been given to staff in customer-facing roles and new payment methods have been introduced, reducing the risk that customers will fall into arrears.
One innovation has been to recruit former police officers as debt investigation officers. Their people skills, augmented by training, have been an invaluable resource in establishing dialogue with non-paying customers.
Customer education has been a major success story of South Lanarkshire Council's change of approach. When agents visit non-payers, there is often a lack of understanding of the seriousness of the situation, generally caused by people refusing to acknowledge there is a problem or the scale of it.
Once the level of debt has been fully explained, and any queries duly answered, steps can be taken to clear the balance. Often at this stage customers are grateful for the personal contact and the fact that something is now being done to tackle the debt.
The next step is to put in place a method for payment. This is done by assessing the level of debt, and also what the customer can afford to repay. Our view is that a sustainable long-term payment solution is preferable to more effective than one that seeks to retrieve larger sums but leads to further broken agreements, social problems and additional stress.
A further service put in place with South Lanarkshire Council meant that each customer was fully aware of the benefits they were entitled to receive, and on many occasions – especially in the case of elderly people – it was discovered that significant benefits were unclaimed.
This allowed relations to be improved with customers, and meant that, longer term, they found it easier to make payments to their council tax arrears.
With regular feedback and the collegiate structure, the council has an accurate, up-to-date picture of the financial and arrears situation of its customers – no longer is it firing into the dark and using guesswork to drive debt management performance.
The new system with South Lanarkshire Council is still in place and delivering results – meaning that long-term non-payment is swiftly becoming a thing of the past.
• John Campaigne is public sector manager at BCW Group
The full article contains 653 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
