13/10/2013
The
Independent along with the
BBC have been running a story about council tax arrears. Both reports concern an estimate of numbers of people in England falling behind with payments because they have lost benefit, with the total figure running at more than 450,000. That is an extrapolation of the 156,500 people who have received summonses as a result of changes to council tax benefit six months ago.
That figure comes from a freedom of information (FoI) trawl orchestrated by the Labour Party. They had asked all 326 billing authorities in England how many court summonses they had issued following the change to council tax benefit in April. Only 112 English local authorities replied, admitting to summonsing 156,500, including 11,830 disabled people, 2,153 carers, 59 veterans and 54 war widows.
Talking up the figures, shadow communities secretary Hilary Benn said David Cameron needed "to wake up to what's happening across the country". Families, he said, "are being forced to choose between staying on the right side of the law and feeding themselves".
But Local Government minister Brandon Lewis argues that the survey is "misleading", telling the BBC there had been about three million summonses in the last year of the Labour government and the situation was now "getting much better".
Labour's figures certainly don't seem to hang together. Our
limited survey is more in line with the Conservative claim, and then there the Money Advice Trust survey from
August suggesting that local authorities in England and Wales last year referred debts to bailiffs on 1.8 million occasions. Not by any means were all of these for council tax, but that figure doesn't seem to square with what Labour is telling us.
Thus we end up with a separate
BBC piece headed: "Labour's figures do not stack up, say Tories", with the survey described as "shoddy". And this should not be. Good opposition, based on sound research is an important part of the democratic process.
In my many talks with Booker, he has been known to observe that, all things being equal, no party should be considered fit for office until they have proved themselves in opposition. And if this is the standard of work on offer, then demonstrably, they are not fit for office. All things, of course, are not equal, but the point stands. Labour should be doing better than this.
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