From Liverpool Daily Post

Liverpool Council has been criticised for using bailiffs to collect council tax by the Local Government Ombudsman

Jul 17 2009 by David Bartlett, Liverpool Daily Post

LIVERPOOL council has been criticised for using bailiffs to collect council tax.

The Local Government Ombudsman said the authority had used bailiffs “inappropriately” in two cases.

A report stated: “[This is] a growing phenomenon nationally on which the Ombudsmen intend to issue a special report in near future.”

The ruling on bailiffs was just one of the findings in Ombudsman Anne Seex’s annual report into local authorities.

Merseyside councils paid out a collective £27,451 in the past year to settle complaints about administrative mistakes.

The Ombudsman got involved in 214 complaints against the six Liverpool city region councils in the year that ended in March, 2009, compared to 420 the year before.

Due to a change in the way figures are compiled, it is not possible to make direct comparisons on the number of complaints received in previous years.

But the figures appear to show that the total number of complaints is falling.

The Ombudsman had 218 enquiries about Wirral Council, of which 158 were forwarded for investigation. The figure was inflated by the number of complaints about the council’s proposed library closures.

Wirral was censured after a child spent more than a year “deprived” of full-time education due to its maladministration.

The authority failed to comply with a decision of a Special Educational Needs and Disability Tribunal that a child should attend a mainstream school.

As a result of a row between the council and the child’s parents about where the family’s main residence was, the child got no full-time education between October, 2005, and November, 2006.

The case was eventually resolved and £1,655 compensation was paid. Mrs Seex said she was “gravely concerned” about the way the council dealt with the case, and as a result has “aired” them with council chief executive Steve Maddox.

In Liverpool, the council paid out £1,500 after losing the files of a person who had spent 18 years in care. Officials are still searching for the documents.

The city council also agreed to pay £11,500 into a trust fund for children who had been living in a house where the council failed to protect them. The family was subject to harassment from people attacking their parents, and the council failed to prevent the family’s eviction, or to help them afterwards.

Sefton Council was heavily criticised for locking a man out of his allotment.

The council was recommended to pay him £25 for each week he had been unable to use his allotment, and an extra £250 for the time and trouble.

“Regrettably, the council’s reaction and response to my reports was negative, and gave me cause for grave concerns about the way it had dealt with the issues,” Mrs Seex stated.

“Those concerns are currently under discussion and I hope that they can be resolved without the need for me to issue a further report.”

A Liverpool Council spokesman said: “We work hard to rectify them as quickly as possible, and learn lessons to prevent them happening again.”

A spokesman for Sefton Council said: "There is one issue still to be resolved which we are currently discussing with the Ombudsman."

A Wirral Council spokesman said: “We are pleased that the Ombudsman wanted the Standards Committee to note the progress being made by the child.”