Hi guys, any help would be appreciated here. Ok so here's the story, I moved out of the house in June 20th last year and the council said i had 6 months before i would have to pay anything as the house would be empty for that time. In my reckoning that takes us up to the 20th December. Apparantly they sent a bill to that address on the 9th December then on the 16th Jan they gave me 7 days to pay...none of which i received even though i have my mail redirected! They now have taken it to court without my knowledge and it is going to the bailiffs within the next 2 weeks. All this bearing in mind im not in the country has been done without my knowledge. However, the amount that was sent to the court will be wrong as the house was repossessed on the 14th jan. There is a nice lady at the council tax office telling me to pay the outstanding amount then apply to the recovery people to get my court costs back!!!

What can i do about this....i don't mind paying the outstanding amount but i shouldn't have to pay the court costs as i haven't received anything from them about the amount i owe. They have a care of address that they send stuff to and there's nothing from them.

Have they not got the judgement by default as they know i am not in the country and they have that in writing?

any help or advice gratefully received...i'm sick of these people railroading us!

If you aren't receiving any correspondence how do you know about all this?

As i said in my earlier post i have been e-mailing a nice lady from the council tax department who has given me all the details of what has been going on.

I contacted them as they finally sent a bill to my forwarding address (parents) who sent it on to me.

Any advice please now i've cleared that up?

The court summons will be for a liability order and not for a judgement or to force you to pay, the costs are part and parcel of obtaining that liability order without which the council cannot take further recovery action.

After the liability order is obtained you will be invited to come to an arrangement with the council to clear the outstanding balance.

If you do not keept to the arrangement, then you will receive 14 days notice that bailiffs will call in an attempt to get the outstanding amount on the councils behalf. If this is unsuccessful, they will hand it back to the council who will then use one of the other methods available to them to collect the outstanding amount.

One of those methods is an Attachement of Earnings. You will be sent forms to fill in asking for details of your employer and it is a legal requirement to fill them in and return them.

If your employment is not within the jurisdiction of the UK, then they can and will apply to the courts for a bankruptcy order to be made against you if the arrears exceed £700.

This seems to be the prefered method now and they are being issued in there thousands and granted.

The final but now not often used recourse is imprisonment, but serving the term does not wipe out the arrears.

Your best bet is to contact the council direct and ask them exactly what the amount is and to what period it covers.

You can then either dispute the term as you were not living there or again ask to make an arrangement to pay.

Council tax debt does not go away unfortunately although they have written it off in the past, they tend to leave it on the books now and make regular attempts at collection.