Dudley Mead: hold on to your hard hat, Dudders - you may need it
It really isn’t true what they say about the Daily Express, that all its readers are either already dead or that they think that Margaret Thatcher is still Prime Minister.
If it was true, then there’d be no point in the reporters and editors on the paper deliberately skewing a news story about uncollected Council Tax by focusing on the amounts unpaid in Labour-controlled boroughs such as Lambeth and Southwark, and burying the news of the worst council in this respect.
Yes, you’ve guessed it, regular reader: the worst council for uncollected Council Tax in the whole of Britain is our very own home borough of Croydon.
Let’s give it up for council leader Mike Fisher, for Dudley Mead, the councillor in charge of “Housing, Finance & Asset Management”, and let’s hear it for our £200,000 per year CEO Jon Rouse.
Because under their sound and financially responsible leadership, Croydon leads the way with what even-slightly-more-right-wing-than-UKIP Express describes as “a colossal £40.2 million left uncollected” in Council Tax.
For once, Croydon is leading the way.
Oh, and the figures are not from any left-wing bunch of troublemakers, but the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy.
Good job, Mike! Way to go, Dudley! Well done, Jon!
#thatissocroydon
What the Express failed to point out was that Croydon has the sixth largest amount of council tax to collect of any council in the UK.
Over 96% of that is successfully collected every year – almost exactly the average collection rate for London.
The arrears figure decreases every year as we get tougher and tougher on non-payers and on top of this the costs of administering collection are being driven down as we get more and more people on to direct debit payments and generally make the system as efficient as possible.
Last year we increased our income by over £1 million by investigating cases of people fraudulently claiming discounts they were not entitled to.
The use of comparative statistics when measuring the performance of one borough against another must always be done by looking at percentages and not simply taking the headline figures.
It’s great to have people like you who are passionate about promoting what a great place Croydon is – but it’s always such a shame when the media sensationalises numbers like this without putting them into the context of Croydon being the most populated borough in London.
We hope you’ll forward this to your readers to put the record straight.