28 May (Part 2) - £150 going begging
Have you had your £150 Council Tax rebate yet? If not you are not alone. Bexley Council said this…
We identified 51,635 Council Taxpayers who pay their Council Tax by Direct
Debit who were eligible for the £150 Council Tax Energy rebate. We have
successfully made payment by BACs to around 75% of these cases starting from the
21 April to the 5 May. There were a number of cases where the Council was unable
to make a payment at this stage because of a mismatch between the information
held on the Council Tax accounts and the bank details.
If you pay your Council Tax by Direct Debit and haven’t received a payment so
far, you will still receive a payment, but it will be administered by cheque. We
will aim to issue these as soon as we possibly can. We do apologise to anyone
who has not yet received their expected payment, but as we are administering
public funds it is vitally important that we undertake necessary checks to
ensure that all payments are made to the right person.
An affected resident writes…
I was looking at my account the other day to see if I had
received the £150 Council Tax rebate from Bexley Council and I know it is
going to surprise you but it has failed to come through.
Having lived at the same address for 13 years
always paying the tax by Direct Debit, on time, and from the same
account I was mystified as to what checks they are carrying out that have
failed me. Still, there you go and in some ways I’m just happy that we are
going to cost them more to process our refund.
Using numbers and percentages is always a red rag to a bull with me. Why crow about 75% when that means you have
failed to process at least 12,900 refunds - or you could look at it that
Bexley Council is hanging on to at least £1·9 million that it frankly should have already given out.
Funny that they give no update on what it will cost
to issue 12,900 cheques and send them out; and neither have they given
themselves any sort of deadline to achieve it. Heavens forbid they should
dwell on the negatives!!
The first [recently deleted] announcement said that 73,000 households in the Borough are eligible
for the Government provided rebate.
How can they have claimed 73,000 households when
in practice they could only identify 51,635 Council taxpayers? Are there that many multiple
homeowners! Surely they were not guilty of overegging their support in the first
place? Not Bexley Conservatives. Straight as a die those guys!!
Good to see that cynicism is still alive and well in Bexley.
My guess is that if Bexley Council knows its resident as Joe Bloggs but his bank
has him as Joe Alfred Bloggs the transaction will fail. If you stumble across
such a situation when transferring money on-line the bank will seek your
agreement to proceed. Probably some automated process employed by Bexley Council
withers and dies when faced with that sort of thing.
My correspondent is still waiting for his hundred and fifty quid.