00:00I mean, there's a backstory to that. About four weeks before that meeting, I was in for a one-on-one
00:04with the Deputy Prime Minister and the head of the Housing and Local Government Department,
00:09Angela Rayner, and I went through a whole list of things where council tax administration is broken.
00:14That question that I asked, we've given them advance notice, and I said this on the show,
00:19and that was the first we heard that they were actually going to look at this issue.
00:22Now, there are many issues on council tax I've been campaigning on, some of them for as long
00:26as 20 years, banging my head against a brick wall. I remember meeting Eric Pickles when he was in
00:31charge of the department to talk about all of these. Today, in about an hour, the government
00:36will formally launch a consultation to many of these administration issues on council tax.
00:42Not the big picture council tax, the small issues, but while they're small, they have massive importance,
00:48and at the top of the list is council tax debt collection, which is so rapid and aggressive,
00:54it would make banks blush. There is no commercial company who can do what the banks do.
01:00You heard me say it there. You miss a payment because you can't afford it. Three weeks later,
01:05they say, we don't want the month anymore, we want the year. Three weeks after that,
01:09they can send bailiffs in, and they do, and those bailiffs have got charges on top of the charges.
01:15So in this consultation today, I am delighted to say, and I'm very grateful for the government
01:19to listening, because this affects over 3 million people. People who go to debt counselling agencies
01:24like Citizens Advice, they're dealing with 10,000 council tax debt complaints a week.
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