Is it legal for a Liability Order to be issued without notice?

[Spenney]

My wife just received 2 letters stating that Liability Orders have been issued against her on 25th September 2002 and 27th August 2003. These letters were in respect of alleged Council Tax arrears.

We have serious concerns about these letters:

1. They are the first communication that she has received from the Council stating that there were any Council Tax arrears.

2. The letters have been sent to her married name, even though at the time of the Liability order she wasn't married and was living at a different address, which doesn't seem to make sense.

3. We have no details of what the arrears are about, but during the period she was living at her previous address her sole income was disability benefit and shouldn't have been liable for Council Tax.

4. The letters were sent our in August during the peak holiday season, and were only received on our return from holiday, meaning that the 14 day grace period had almost elapsed, and although we attempted to contact the Council to resolve this during the remaining few days, they were not available (presumably due to their staff being absent for holidays!)

5. The Council only initiated these proceedings after they were notified that we had got married and was now in a position to pay Council Tax in the future.

6. Court costs have been added to the 'debt' even though no notification was received that the debt even existed.

I have read through some of the threads here and get the impression that what they are doing, whilst being common Council practice, is not in line with the law

Please can any of you clever legal types give me some advice on what I should do next, My first reaction is to try again to call them, but previous attempts have proven unsuccessful.

Thanks

[Amethyst]

Re: Is it legal for a Liability Order to be issued without notice?

Did she apply for/receive council tax benefit at her previous address ?

The original paperwork may have gone to her old address - have you asked the council/court this?

Re ''5. The Council only initiated these proceedings after they were notified that we had got married and was now in a position to pay Council Tax in the future.'' - how do you know this or is it an assumption ?

[Spenney]

Re: Is it legal for a Liability Order to be issued without notice?

The Council say that the original paperwork was sent to her old address, they are claiming that an arrangement was set up to recoup monies owed to them directly from benefits, but for some reason this didn't happen.

They claim that it was when my wife was at her previous address that letters were sent, but they are unable to provide copies. They also say that a summons was sent to that address, but as none of this communication was received and they will not provide us with any evidence of it having happened, it is very difficult to know what was actually sent.

In all our dealings with the Council they have proven remarkable in that they continue to operate given the rate at which they are able to mislay documentation!

We know that the Council only initiated these proceedings after they were notified, as the letter stating that we had 14 days to comply with this unknown Liability Order was issued in my wife's married name, which they could only have known after she contacted them to inform them that her circumstances had changed.

They told me today that the only way that I could prevent extra Baliff charges being added on to the existing debt, (which they have already added court costs onto), is for me to agree to an arrangement to pay, even though the charges are in dispute. I have agreed to a payment arrangement, although if advised otherwise I can still stop the payments.

The difficulty that I have is that the first communication that we have received is this notification, which arriving at the time it did gave us no time to investigate the basis of what they did. I am not sure of the law, but my previous experience of English law is that there has to be 'reasonable' effort exercised to resolve debt issues before being granted a court order to recover any monies. I can't see that sending a letter demanding immediate payment, with notification that bailiffs would be sent is not reasonable effort. In fact the letter notifying us was not sent registered post and if we had taken our holiday 2 weeks later, then the first we would have known about this debt would be bailiffs knocking at the door. There has to be something wrong with that?

[WendyB]

Re: Is it legal for a Liability Order to be issued without notice?

Well, do you actually owe the money, or not? If they have previously applied for an Attachment on benefits then your wife should have known about this, even if the attachment never got set up. Whether or not she should not have been liable due to being on Disability benefits is sort of by the by, they don't automatically grant rebates, you have to apply for them. Not sure if you can backdate a rebate application to cover the time they are asking for arrears for?

[Spenney]

Re: Is it legal for a Liability Order to be issued without notice?

The question of whether we owe money or not is impossible to answer as the Council are refusing to give information, which is the whole point of what I was asking. If they had simply charged a high Council Tax, then I could have queried it, but would eventually simply have to pay.

What I am querying is whether they have the right to send bailiffs in without effectively informing you, and giving you a chance to query where the bill has come from, and adding additional court charges on without giving the opportunity to challenge before Court or even in Court as to why this is happening?

Perhaps a corollary would be would they have the right to seize my possessions, given that my wife was living on benefits and had no possessions that would have brought in even enough money to cover the bailiffs expenses?

[Amethyst]

Re: Is it legal for a Liability Order to be issued without notice?

The liability order was given in 2002/3 whilst your now wife was living at that address.

The court should have the original documents regarding the order - however they won't have the original letters.

I would expect the liability order was dealt with through an attachment of benefits so it depends then wht she was getting at the time as to what it should have been attached to. I would think the DSS would have details of that if the attachment order was sent through to them, they might also have a record of why it wasn't done at the time.

The Council will have details of whether she received council tax benefit at the time. If her sole income was DLA then yes she should have done, and housing benefit - so again this would be found out by speaking to the council.

I think as a backup (and you should be able to speak to the council tax benefit department of the council quite easily) your wife should send the council a Subject access request (data protection act) to retreive all the information applicable to her.

You should keep paying what you have made an arrangement on for the time being until you know where you stand with this.

Its pretty normal for them to pick it up again now if they lost contact with your wife when she moved and were unable to sort out the issue with the liability order until now.

Attachments can not be made on the care component of DLA.

[Spenney]

Re: Is it legal for a Liability Order to be issued without notice?

I have managed to get a copy of letters written by the Council, (not from them of course!), that say that the Liability Order was enacted through attachment of benefits. I suspect that what happened was that when my wife came off the benefits, (other than DLA), and the attachment was no longer being paid that they re-enacted the Liability Order.

However, if a proportion of the Liability Order has been paid, then surely the original Liability Order is no longer valid? In fact at the same time as she came off benefits, my wife requested from the Council a statement of any outstanding Council Tax owed. She received a statement that nothing was owed, however that presumably only covered where we currently live. In fact if they had told her that the full amount was owed we would have just paid not being any the wiser - it was only because they sent a threatening letter demanding it out of the blue that we looked into it and found that most of it appears to have been paid.

The real difficulty is that the way they have behaved hasn't given us time to find out what it was all about, and I am certain that what they are doing is illegal in some way. Surely the English legal system has some protection against a court ruling against someone without notifying them that they are being taken to court? and when a Court has ruled and people have paid or at least started to pay surely the Court ruling cannot be reapplied? If it can then the debt effectively can never be paid off!

Given that I now have evidence that benefits were attached, although we haven't yet established exactly how much has already been paid, I will stop the payment arrangement whilst I try and contact the Council again as it is not clear how much should be paid, and I have no doubt that getting money back from them will be much more difficult than not paying it in the first place!

My wife will contact both the Benefits office and the Council with a Subject Access Request; but I somehow don't think that it will work with the Council. Previous dealings with them suggest that data is held in numerous unlinked computers, and not even shared between adjacent desks, and with this situation they have shown a willingness to be very cavalier in the way that they deal with their legal responsibility.