Kirklees Council writes off £5.22m in debt, with over £2m from unpaid Council Tax
A meeting heard that despite "best efforts" some debts could not be collected
Kirklees Council wrote off £5.22m in debt in the last financial year, with over £2m of this coming from unpaid Council Tax.
A report on the bad debt written off by the local authority in the 2024/25 financial year went to the latest meeting of the Corporate Governance and Audit Committee. A total of £5.22m was written off in 2024/25 compared to £5.36m in 2023/24. The top five areas where debt has been written off for 2024/25 are adult social care (£150k), Housing Benefit overpayment (£238k), the Housing Revenue Account (£394k), Council Tax (£2.37m), and Business Rates (£1.12m).
Kirklees Council’s Head of Welfare and Exchequer, Sarah Brown, gave a presentation at the meeting and said that despite the council’s “best efforts” not all debts can be collected, with budget provision built in to address this. She said: “We know Kirklees has a good record of collecting income due and a range of supportive measures to help bill payers who may be struggling, as part of a broader suite of income collection and recovery measures to ensure that everybody who can pay does pay.”
Ms Brown also explained that in 2024/25, income collection was “not without its challenges” due to national financial problems, like the cost of living crisis, continuing to impact residents. She added: “Debt write off has proportionally risen in that financial year compared with the previous year but of course, that does compare proportionally to the debit raised.”
Chair of the committee, Cllr John Taylor (Con, Kirkburton) wanted to know what efforts the local authority was making to stop debt from being created in the first place. He described some of the council’s processes for collecting income as “quite out of date” and spoke of instances where payments for services aren’t taken by the local authority in advance.
He added: “We’ve got historic processes that create debt, and as soon as you create debt, you increase the risk of that debt not being paid.”
Responding to Cllr Taylor’s points, the council’s Service Director for Finance, Kevin Mulvaney, said that there is a debt recovery transformation project underway. Part of this has included gathering data about debtors, the services impacted and how long the debt has been incurred for. Going forward, the council will be looking at how processes can be changed to prevent debt from being created in the first place.
Committee member, Cllr Kath Pinnock (Lib Dems, Cleckheaton), highlighted a table in the report showing how Kirklees Council fares for debt collection against other local authorities. Kirklees fell around the middle of the 18 listed councils. Councillor Pinnock wanted to know what the councils performing better than Kirklees were doing differently.
Ms Brown said that the council meets with regional colleagues to benchmark and that there isn’t a “magic formula” out there where local authorities are doing anything massively different to Kirklees.