Council tries to get £11.96m owed tax from West Berkshire residents

There is £11.96m of outstanding council tax in West Berkshire.

The figure has been added up over the last five years – and saw a doubling from £5m to £10m during the Covid pandemic.

The council says it is still trying to collect the cash – but says it budgets on collecting at around 99 per cent of the tax to raise its £140m budget to spend on services.

It has issued 3,885 enforcement notices and West Berkshire is ramping up its attempts to collect unpaid tax.

This year, WBC passed 1,700 cases to the enforcements agents and issued 341 attachments to earnings orders and 799 attachments to benefits orders.