FOI Into Councillors And Their Council Tax

Wrexham.com noticed a few councils around the country have had issues with their Councillors not paying Council Tax.

In some places prosecutions have taken place, some resulting in suspensions from political parties or a ‘rap’ – whatever that is over the non payment of Council Tax.

Locally we have not seen any data on this, so placed an Freedom Of Information Request with Wrexham Council to find out more.

We asked about the number of occasions from the last set of local elections to date that reminder letters were sent to the authority’s Councillors for non-payment of council tax.

We also asked the amount of money owed for each occasion a letter was sent.

There are if course data protection issues on naming individual Councillors, and to get around this we suggested that Wrexham Council could follow other councils by giving data by political grouping.

Again, logically if there are several of one political grouping this keeps things anonymous whereas if there is only one councillor in a political group it would not.

We also asked for details on number of letters, and manner of settlement eg. ‘paid in full’ or ‘court appearance and settled’.

Wrexham Council replied to the FOI as below saying: “For the period 05/05/2012 – 22/08/2014 one serving Councillor has been issued with 3 council tax reminder notices.”

The details provided are as follows:
Reminder sent July 2012, value of £119.00 , paid July 2012
Reminder sent Dec 2012, value of £119.00, paid Dec 2012
Reminder sent June 2014, value of £127.00, paid June 2014

No details of political groupings were provided.

It is pleasing to report that the issues faced by Councils with their own Councillors around the UK do not appear to be mirrored locally in Wrexham.