An elderly resident in Bury has blasted her local council for ‘negligence’ after she received a court summons for not paying her council tax despite sending in two cheques.
The Prestwich resident, who has asked not to be named, said she sent a £120.04 cheque off to Bury Council to cover her council tax in April, but a month later received a letter from the local authority informing her that she had not yet paid her monthly tax.
The 88-year-old said she then wrote back to the council with a further cheque for the full year’s amount as she didn’t ‘want any more aggravation’ and hoped it would resolve the issue.
READ MORE: Andy Burnham admits plans for cheaper bus fares by September still not signed off
But she then received another letter from Bury Council informing that as they had yet to receive her payment, she would be summoned to court in July over the matter.
“I tried multiple times to contact them on the phone and in letters and I just got no response,” the woman told the M.E.N. "My son even sent them an email saying I had sent them two cheques and got no reply."
In an attempt to resolve the issue, the resident then contacted Bury South MP Christian Wakeford about the matter.
“It was only after my local MP contacted them that I was able to get a response from the council,” she explained. “They told me that they had in fact received my two cheques and had sent them off to be cashed by the bank but, by that point, I had already cancelled them.”
The council later apologised to the resident and cancelled the court summons after she paid the council tax over the phone. She said she was told in a letter that the council had been experiencing ‘some operational issues with the banking of cheques received over the last few weeks’ and that ‘the contact centre had been experiencing lengthy delays on the telephone due to a high number of calls relating to government energy payments’.
But the resident said she feels their apology is not enough and has asked for compensation. She said she has since been told they cannot provide her with any reimbursement.
“I believe the council has been negligent and inefficient,” she added. “I feel their apology isn’t enough because it made me ill. I couldn’t sleep and I was very stressed because of it.
“It’s also the fact that I had to contact the MP to work on my behalf to get things done. There could be many people who have had a similar experience but people don’t complain. I want to draw attention to this because it’s wrong and I would have had to go to court over it.
“Something’s got to be done about it because I don’t feel they’re working properly there.”
Bury Council apologised for the distress caused and said it would be writing to the resident again.
A council spokesman said: “We are very sorry for the distress caused by this incident. This was caused by our failure to bank her cheques in a timely manner, which resulted in the incorrect issuing of a summons. We also failed to acknowledge her correspondence sooner – if we had, this matter could have been rectified much earlier.
“The problem was caused by operational issues with the banking of cheques that we received at this time, and the Contact Centre had been experiencing lengthy delays on the telephones as so many people were contacting the council about the Government’s energy payments.
“Regardless of the reasons, this situation should not have arisen. We are writing again to [the resident] to offer our apologies and assure her that lessons have been learned.”
Read more of today's top stories here
READ NEXT:
