i kick manchester city council‘s fat arses – yet again!
many years ago, i fought the buggers through the courts to force them to pay me compensation for the loss of my flat when olde hulme was demolished to make way for the student ghetto we have now. it took about three years and several lawyers telling me i hadnae a hope of getting any money, until my stubbornness paid off and i scored about three grand from the council’s coffers.
today’s victory was much smaller than that and more of a moral one, but a victory nonetheless!
it all started way back in december 2003, when i was planning coming off the dole and setting up my own business:
i wrote to the council and told them that my circumstances were about to change and they needed to reassess my entitlement to housing benefit and council tax rebate. in their usual fuckwitted fashion, they then immediately stopped my benefits and took until the end of march 2004 to sort out my new entitlements, by which time i’d run up about £500 on my creditcard, paying off my rent and also been threatened with eviction coz, even in spite of this, i stilled owed about £400 in arrears.
then, to rub salt into the wound, when they did finally sort my housing benefit and council tax rebate out, they messed it up anyway, so that i didnae get as much as i should have in the first place. by that stage i was so glad that the useless twats had finally awarded me anything at all that i didnae bother trying to get them to reassess it again. i just thought “i’ll quit while i’m only slightly behind”.
and there the story would have ended but for the fact that when i finally got my award of benefit, there was no mention council tax rebate, just a measly amount of £27 a week housing benefit. i’d received a bill for the full amount of council tax just a week or so before that, so i wrote to them again, asking if that amount was correct, given that when the bill was issued, they were still processing my claim for council tax rebate. in their usual ignorant fashion, they ignored me until i’d written and emailed twice more, before eventually replying that the amount was correct as i didnae qualify for any council tax rebate. fair enough! – except that whilst i was waiting for them to deign to reply to me, my council tax became overdue, and the bastards took me to court for not paying and got a liability order against me. then they sent me a letter saying in essence “ya boo! sucks to you. the court says you’ve got to pay up!” with a form to fill in declaring how much i was prepared to pay each week [with sections to declare my income and all sorts of private stuff]
i wrote back again, saying that they shouldn’t have taken me to court in the first place as i was in the middle of correspondence with them about the amount i was liable for. then a couple of weeks later a fuckin bailiff turns up on the door, saying he’s there to seize goods as the council have passed the account onto them [because i didn'tsend back that form]. i told the bailiff to ‘feck off’, but he was actually sound – giving me the usual “i hate this job, but i’ve got a family to feed…” concentration camp guard line. anyway, in the end he just made up a load of crap on his form and put down that i had a ‘pink mountain bike with blue spots’ that he’d laid ‘walking restraint’ on [which means he can come back and sieze it if i dinnae keep up my payments to the bailiffs].
well, by now i was really pissed off. i thought “i told you bastards in december 2003 that my circumstances were changing and here i am at the end of 2004 with an eviction notice from the landlord hanging over me and having to pay court fees and money to feckin bailiffs as if it was my fault”
so, i wrote to the council yet again, telling them how out of order i thought they were and got the usual “up yours. we’re the council. we’re always right” response [eventually!]
then i thought “i’m not giving up on this one”, so i compiled a big dossier with dates and copies of all correspondence and made a complaint to the local government ombudsman – not expecting any joy, since i always seem to get a “there’s nothing we can do about it” response when i ask anyone ‘official’ for help with stuff like this.
sure enough, a few weeks later i got a reply from the ombudsman, saying they’d passed my complaint onto manchester city council to give them the chance to resolve it themselves, before the ombudsman would get involved and that they’d write back to me in twelve weeks to see if it had been sorted.
“well that’s great” i thought. “i’ve already spent most of the year writing to the council and now, instead of investigating the complaint, you’ve just sent it back for them to sit on for another three months. i could have done that my feckin’ self!”
and what a surprise, a week or so later i get a letter from the council saying “we’ve been passed a complaint by the ombudsman…. looked at it again… we’re not at fault…. you’re shit…. fuck off!…. etc etc.”
at the end of the letter was some guff about how my complaint had now been dealt with at level 1 of the council’s complaints procedures and giving me the name of someone else i could ‘escalate’ it to [at level 2 of their complaints procedure] if i wasn’t satisfied, so [irish thran*-ness kicking in now!], i wrote back and said. “no, i’m not satisfied with that and i want to escalate it to the next level!”
the weeks dragged by with nothing further heard from the council and then a couple of days ago i got a letter from the ombudsman saying the twelve weeks was up and asking if my complaint had been resolved. so i’m preparing to write back saying “no. the city council sat on my complaint for three months and did feck all, just as i knew they would” when lo and behold! upon my doormat this morning lands a letter from the city council;
three pages full of half-arsed justification for their actions “we were very busy… we did reply to this, that and the other letter promptly… you failed to make this payment…” but [surprisingly!] in amongst it all, the occasional paragraph that one might gloatingly call ‘snivelling apology’; “the service you received was completely unacceptable… sincerely apologise for the distress….” and so on. i think “OK. they’re trying to lay it out as if we’re both equally to blame, but hopefully they’ll cancel all the bailiff shit and let me pay my council tax to them again instead” [which was the minimum i'd asked for in my original complaint to the ombudsman.
however, as i near the end of the letter, i come across the following snippets:
".........i consider we were wrong to send your account to the bailiff. you have asked us to reinstate your right to pay your council tax by instalments direct to the council, rather than to the bailiff. this will be done..."
"....... you have asked to be compensated for the "various court fees' and bailiff's fees incurred, if not additionally for the distress and embarassment caused". i have arranged for the liability order costs of £55 to be cancelled and for us to be billed the bailiff's fees of £49. additionally i have arranged for the £180 you have paid to the bailiffs to be sent to us and told them to take no further action on your case and to return your account to the council. when the payment is received from the bailiff and with the costs removed, the balance on your council tax account will then be £42,42...."
".......taking everything into account and as a gesture of goodwill i will make a payment to you of £242,42. of this £42,42 will be credited to your council tax account and i will send you a cheque for the balance of £200......."
so in other words, they've writeen off my remaining council tax for the year and are sending me £200 as well. i believe that is what's known in the trade as "a result!".
so now i eagerly await my next run in with my favourite bunch of fuckwitts.... or will they just leave me alone now and go and hassle someone less willing to stand up for themselves?
[*thran - old irish slang word and one of my granny's regulars. means 'stubborn' but in the sense of the more someone tells you to do A, the more you want to do B, or the more someone tells you that you can't do something, the more you determine that you will do it. according to my mammy. it's a very irish trait!]
