What English councils could learn from Council Tax interventions in Wales
24 May
The Welsh Government introduced a number of measures to mitigate the impact of council tax liabilities on vulnerable households in order to improve the management of council tax collection.
Policy in Practice was commissioned to review and evaluate these measures and actions. This research is one strand of the work within the broader programme examining options for reforming council tax and making it fairer.
Listen back to hear
- The latest research on the cost of living crisis and our analysis of the unclaimed benefits gap
- Relevant learnings from our analysis of the Council Tax interventions introduced by the Welsh Government to help low income households
- Trends from our work modelling Council Tax support schemes for English councils
- Case study: How one district council is proactively driving take up of Council Tax support using a data led approach
Listen back to our speakers
Moving to 100% scheme can save a lot of money in terms of collection rates and extra support. There's mental health support, debt advice, benefits advice; all these things that fall on the council can be minimised by not asking people to pay council tax that they will not be able to pay.
It was just lovely to hear from Jane about that work being done at Folkestone and Hythe, especially the take-up campaigns as 'business as usual' rather than a one-off campaign. It's become part of their normal business. These take-up campaigns are really important. 27 million households missing out on £2.9 billion. That's just huge numbers
As of Monday, we made awards to 181 people. The value of those awards were £89,327.94. That means that there's 181 people that are a lot better off than they would be if we hadn't made our intervention with them. It means that we're not looking to chase that money because it's already been covered by CTR.
