No council tax fines in Wolverhampton despite new policy

No-one has been fined for failing to fill in their council tax forms despite a £70 penalty being introduced last year, a council has admitted.

Wolverhampton council, which has to make further savings of £46m by 2019, introduced the policy last November.

A BBC Freedom of Information (FOI) request revealed £4.4m in council tax is unpaid from the last financial year, double the previous year.

The council said it was checking people's entitlement to discounts.

Almost 25,000 council tax accounts were not fully paid as of 31 March this year, the FOI showed.

Asked about the £4.4m arrears from the last financial year, cabinet member for finance Andrew Johnson said: "We anticipate for this year eventually we will be at about a 99% collection rate based on previous years' performances."

He said nobody has been fined because the council would not begin checking people's entitlement to discounts or exemptions "until this month".

"I expect there will be a number of fines issued as a result of the canvass in June and subsequent canvasses," he said.

Nationally, the Department for Communities and Local Government said that town halls across England had failed to collect about £2.5bn of council tax and arrears since 2010-11.

The power to issue penalties for unpaid council tax was introduced by the government in 1992 but not all councils adopted it - only Wolverhampton and Sandwell have in the West Midlands.

A spokesman for the Local Government Association said the penalty would only affect a small number of residents, as it was not routine practice to submit forms or "returns".

It is usually only a change in circumstance that needs some sort of formal update.

In 2014, the Wolverhampton authority announced it would have to cut 1,400 jobs and make massive service reductions or it would be down to its last £620,000 and "bankrupt shortly after".