If anyone could give some advice on this I would be great. Following loss of my partner in August I had a nervous breakdown had to go into hospital for a week. My parents had to take care of my children and its been a pretty devastating and traumatic year, given the nature that he passed away. We are back on track now and rebuilding our lives I was out of work for a few weeks and inevitably have fallen behind on a few things. One being council tax, I missed 2 payments totally £84.44. I'm sure I spoke to them on the phone at the time and told them what had happened and that I was struggling i have received a 'south East Surrey Petty Sessional Division Summons for non-payment of council tax' - the summons requires me to attended a local magistrates on 12 December at 9.30AM and includes court costs of £50.00. Any advice would be extremely well accepeted!

I will try to fill you in as briefly as possible! In September I received documents from Northampton of a claim issued by Hoist Portfolio. the particulars of claim were very vague ie no date of debt, no date of assignment etc. I acknowledged immediately and stated intention to defend. I sent off CCA and CPR requests in accordance with the rules. These were disregarded and I received no response. It was allocated to small claims and transferred to my local court. The hearing date was set and a deadline of 25th Feb was set for returning witness statements. At this point I had received precisely zero info from the claimant as requested, I constructed my witness statement along the lines of 'I have no info re the debt so can't defend something I have no knowledge of', the claimant was attempting to frustrate my efforts to defend in not disclosing any information and disregarding my CCA request and CPR request. I served a copy in the claimant and made sure it was with the court in time, brownie points to me I've now received (after the deadline) the claimants statement, and I'm wondering what to do. In their bundle they have the original agreement (in a different name to that on the court docs) but barely legible, a statement of account, and issue of default. My query comes in because on the statement of account, there are payments between July 2009 and Feb 2011 which came from a current account but we're not expressly authorised by myself. The debt is for a credit card and I had a current account with the same bank. So these payments were taken from my current account (I guess under the original contract I signed for the card this was authorised) but I didn't expressly make those payments myself. In fact I seem to remember trying to stop the payments, and they kept taking them without my agreement. Do these count as acknowledgement of debt? If these payments are disallowed, the debt should be statue barred (date of default was 25th June 2009 and I would argue that subsequent payments were not made with my authority). Or does it not matter, as I signed a contract therefore indicating my authority to take these payments? If it's not statue barred what should I do, as I'm now thinking they have me over a barrel even though their documents were late to arrive. Apologies if this doesn't make sense to you all, it does in my little head! Many thanks in advance for any advice you can offer!

Is this the first time you’ve heard about SID? No worries. The video below will brief you on what it’s all about, focusing on this year’s theme“Play Your Part for a Better Internet”. More Than an Invitation, It’s a Challenge In 2015, Insafe, the organization behind the SID global campaign, came up with the slogan “Let’s Create a Better Internet Together”. Although the current and previous themes are essentially not that different, the former’s tone and scope have indeed changed from merely inviting, which anyone can easily turn down, to challenging and reminding Internet users that they can make a difference, no matter how small the effort. We think it is the perfect message that can drive one to respond with greater seriousness and vigilance in taking care of not just what we say online but how we, as privacy- and security- conscious citizens of the Web, should generally respond to the growing sophistication and prevalence of digital threats like exploits and ransomware against businesses and consumers of all ages. Threats in the UK: A Brief Review To help further foster this call for UK citizens to get involved in creating a better and safer online experience, let us refresh ourselves with a four-point list of worrying security findings from previous months that hit the news: •A report in mid-2015, our friends at Symantec named the United Kingdom as the most targeted and cyber-attacked nation in the whole of Europe, with a third of them targeting small- to medium-sized businesses. •The National Crime Agency (NCA) revealed that the UK lost £16 billion to cybercrime and cyber-enabled crimes. One of the main concerns of the organization is the rise of mobile malware due to the increasing number of apps being used for financial transactions. A rife market of users depending on the Internet to procure of goods and services online also proved to be attractive to online criminals. •Speaking of mobile, Ponemon surveyed hundreds of individuals in the UK and reported that majority of Brits would prefer losing their wallets than their smartphones—not because of the value of their device but what is found in it. In fact, they have assessed the data in their smartphones would cost around £6.5 thousand. Although they put great value and importance to their devices, 47 percent of those surveyed don’t think that having data protection features on phones are needed. •In November alone of 2015, the UK was attacked by 1,200 types of malware families. Topping the count were variants from the Kelihos Trojan, the Necurs backdoor, the Bedep Trojan, and the Conficker worm. To add more to the above, our telemetry data has showed that in last 12 months, a total of 154.5M malicious files and 138.2M potentially unwanted program (PUP) have been detected from machines based in the UK. Read More

Defence Business Services customer satisfaction survey 2015 At Veterans UK (part of Defence Business Services) we are always trying to improve the services we deliver to our customers. Read More Here: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/defence-business-services-customer-satisfaction-survey-2015

Channel4 Dispatches programme on the new pension rules. http://www.channel4.com/programmes/dispatches