Over 4.4 million unpaid council tax bills have resulted in £4.4 billion in arrears, with over one million households referred to bailiffs annually. These figures, revealed through our investigation for ICS Digital and their client SellHouseFast, outline the scale of the issue.
Our findings made a sizeable splash, with the investigation being picked up by The Telegraph, The Mirror, The Express, and several local titles.
The inspiration for this investigation came from reports about “secret courts”—a process where councils apply for liability orders en masse in bulk court hearings. Critics argue these hearings often leave debtors unaware of proceedings until enforcement actions, such as bailiff visits, begin. This prompted us to dig deeper into the scale of council tax arrears and the enforcement measures taken by councils.
To collect the data, we turned to WhatDoTheyKnow.com, a platform that streamlines the Freedom of Information (FoI) process. Using its premium features, we selected all 315 councils in England and Wales responsible for collecting council tax from a checklist, submitted our requests, and tracked responses through the site’s notification system. This approach stopped any stray emails from falling through the cracks and helped us achieve a respectable 84% response rate (265 councils).
Writing the FoI request was, as always, a balancing act. It needed to be specific enough to build a solid time series for tracking changes but not so demanding that councils could reject it under Section 12 of the FoI Act for exceeding cost limits. The final questions were
- Total Number of Council Tax Arrears Cases: How many accounts were in arrears at the time of the request?
- Top Three Largest Arrears by Individuals: What are the three highest council tax debts, including the amount owed, the time in recovery, and the first three digits of the postcode?
- Referral to Legal Proceedings: How many cases had councils referred to court for liability orders in the financial years 2022/23 and 2023/24?
- Use of Bailiffs: How many accounts had been referred to bailiffs in the same years?
The data threw up some newsworthy findings. To start, Birmingham City Council, which declared bankruptcy in September 2023, reported £194 million in unpaid council tax—the second highest in the country. Among these accounts, the three largest individual debts—each exceeding £465,000—were linked to portfolios of multiple properties and had been in recovery for four years. Liverpool City Council recorded the highest overall arrears, with £362 million owed across 539,752 accounts.
The enforcement data was especially striking. Over one million households had been referred to bailiffs, with 1.3 million referrals made in 2023/24 alone—a 21% increase from the previous year. The East Midlands saw the steepest rise in referrals at 68%, followed by the West Midlands at 58%. The average debt across accounts stood at £997, though extreme cases far exceeded this amount. One account holder in Birmingham, for example, owed an eye-watering £641,777.
London and the South East recorded the highest total arrears, at £905 million and £786 million respectively, reflecting higher property values. The North West followed closely with £768 million in arrears, while Wales and the North East reported the lowest totals, at £140 million and £164 million.
Of the 315 councils surveyed, 50 failed to provide data—even after we allowed triple the statutory 20-working-day period to maximise the response rate. Recalcitrant authorities that fail to comply with their duties under the FoI Act are, unfortunately, par for the course in FoI surveys.
Click on the following hyperlinks to read write ups of our investigation on behalf of ICS Digital and their client SellHouseFast in The Telegraph (paywalled), The Express, and The Mirror.
