Jamie Hailstone 03 February 2012

GMB slams councils for £1bn in uncollected tax

More than £1bn of council tax and business rates has not been collected this year, trade union the GMB has claimed.

The union has published figures for all 326 councils in and Wales. It estimates the amount of uncollected council tax in England currently stands at £612,458,780 for 2010/11, and over the same time period, there are uncollected business rates worth £409,371,840.

Uncollected council tax in Wales is valued at just over £36m and uncollected business rates are more than £23m.

The figures suggest that Birmingham City Council has the highest level of uncollected council tax in England, with £33.2m.Westminster City Council is second with £29.6m and Manchester City Council is third with £18.4m.

Last year, an investigation by the Evening Standard news paper found that uncollected tax exceeded £500M in the Capital alone. 

'Urgent reforms to assist hard-pressed council staff to collect these taxes are long overdue,' GMB's national secretary, Paul Kenny, said.

'It is high time that local and national politicians threw their weight behind the GMB's campaign for changes in the law relating to the way these taxes are collected, rather than dismissing the GMB figures as distortions or exaggerations as many of them will do,' he added.

Also read: Chris Game is a visiting lecturer at INLOGOV, the Institute of Local Government Studies at Birmingham University, on council collection rates. 

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