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Croydon Council will not accept my money for Council Tax
Hello everyone. This is my first post in here, so my apologies if I make mistakes. Also, I would like to thank in advance to anyone who may care to contribute with any input. I will try to keep things short and to the point. I have decided to ask for help on LB's site after reading some posts on here, while looking for advice on how to deal with bailiffs and councils. What won me over to this site was an incredible reply to a post made by thequeenisclarice, where mystery1 was giving her step by step instruction on how to proceed. What blew me away was the incredible amount of time and resource, patience and kindness spent by one person towards another, a complete stranger that he had never met and who was not going to give him any remuneration or any kind of special favor in return. That really restored my faith in the human element and made me want to be seeking help nowhere else but here. Respect to him and to all the others like him out there. We really could do with more like them in this day and age...
My problem is with Croydon Council(CC) and the way they are dealing with Council Tax(CT). We(myself and my wife) owe them money in arrears, but when we offered to pay £10 a week, due to only myself working, while my wife is raising our 2 young kids, they declined and insisted we deal with the enforcement agents.
To cut a long story short, we owed money to CC for CT, starting with our move to this new address in 2011. CC only sent us the first CT bill 2 years later. After a few months, while we were struggling to find some money to pay them, CC took us to court and then asked us to fill in a Statement of Incoming and Outgoings, in Oct 2013, which we did. We also offered to pay £10 a week towards the sum that we owed them, around £3098. They never replied and a month later we started getting letters from Equita, a bailiff company, for the sum of £3395. We decided to ignore Equita and wait for a reply from the council. We didn't hear from them until 6 months later, March 2014, sending us an annual bill as if nothing ever happened. They started sending letters with recalculated sums, mentioning the £3098 being subject to court proceedings. We kept getting letters from both Equita and CC for awhile. After about 10 letters sent out to us, Equita stopped writing(last letter received 13/03/2014).
Recently we started receiving letters from a different bailiff company, JBW. last one came on the 2nd April 2016, requesting the sum of £3527.96 to be paid, while informing us that the case has been passed to an enforcement agent. So whatever happened to Equita, they just gave up? Should we also ignore this JBW and hope they will also go away(sarcasm)?
I called CC today, in an attempt to arrange a payment plan, only to be told to speak to JBW. When I asked whatever happened to our proposal to pay £10 a week towards our debt, they said they couldn't accept it, as it was too little. And when I asked why they never wrote back to let us know, the man said that they deal with too many people and can't possibly answer to all!! Great. I felt like an ant, being talked down to by an elephant.
So now I was considering sending these JBW a letter suggested by Amethyst , requesting a breakdown of charges. Or start sending money to CC and if so, how can we do that? Or should we do both? What do you knowledgeable people out here suggest we should do?
Thanks, Michael
My problem is with Croydon Council(CC) and the way they are dealing with Council Tax(CT). We(myself and my wife) owe them money in arrears, but when we offered to pay £10 a week, due to only myself working, while my wife is raising our 2 young kids, they declined and insisted we deal with the enforcement agents.
To cut a long story short, we owed money to CC for CT, starting with our move to this new address in 2011. CC only sent us the first CT bill 2 years later. After a few months, while we were struggling to find some money to pay them, CC took us to court and then asked us to fill in a Statement of Incoming and Outgoings, in Oct 2013, which we did. We also offered to pay £10 a week towards the sum that we owed them, around £3098. They never replied and a month later we started getting letters from Equita, a bailiff company, for the sum of £3395. We decided to ignore Equita and wait for a reply from the council. We didn't hear from them until 6 months later, March 2014, sending us an annual bill as if nothing ever happened. They started sending letters with recalculated sums, mentioning the £3098 being subject to court proceedings. We kept getting letters from both Equita and CC for awhile. After about 10 letters sent out to us, Equita stopped writing(last letter received 13/03/2014).
Recently we started receiving letters from a different bailiff company, JBW. last one came on the 2nd April 2016, requesting the sum of £3527.96 to be paid, while informing us that the case has been passed to an enforcement agent. So whatever happened to Equita, they just gave up? Should we also ignore this JBW and hope they will also go away(sarcasm)?
I called CC today, in an attempt to arrange a payment plan, only to be told to speak to JBW. When I asked whatever happened to our proposal to pay £10 a week towards our debt, they said they couldn't accept it, as it was too little. And when I asked why they never wrote back to let us know, the man said that they deal with too many people and can't possibly answer to all!! Great. I felt like an ant, being talked down to by an elephant.
So now I was considering sending these JBW a letter suggested by Amethyst , requesting a breakdown of charges. Or start sending money to CC and if so, how can we do that? Or should we do both? What do you knowledgeable people out here suggest we should do?
Thanks, Michael
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