Update Tuesday 30 July: Haringey resident Reverend Paul Nicolson is refusing to pay his council tax in protest at the cuts to council tax benefit and other government welfare ‘reforms.’ He’s been summonsed to court on Friday for a liability order hearing. I spent this morning talking to him about it. There’s a protest on Friday to support him – see more at DPAC here.

Scroll down for an update from Monday 29 July – where Leeds city council finally confirmed to me that it WAS slapping liability orders on people who were summonsed to court last week and that it WILL send in bailiffs and also deduct outstanding council tax from people’s low wages and benefits if they don’t/can’t pay now that their council tax benefit has been cut. Charming. Really bloody charming this is.

Grim scenes on Thursday inside and outside Leeds Magistrates Court – where people with no money gathered with court summonses for non-payment of council tax. Apparently, several thousand people have been summonsed to appear over the next few weeks: a group for July 25 (the day I went there) and more for 1 August. I’ve asked the council to confirm the numbers and plenty more besides, but it has been slow to respond, as you’ll see below…

Anyway – as most people will know, one of this government’s charming initiatives this year has been to cut council tax benefit for people on benefits and low incomes. People who previously paid little or no council tax – because their incomes were low, let’s not forget –  must now pay. Leeds city council is enforcing this benefit cut, with predictable results – hardship, plenty of agony for people who have nothing anyway and people in tears outside the courts as the terror of further costs and even arrest takes over. But tough shit for them, it seems – here’s council leader Keith Wakefield in the very same week of the summons date, if you don’t mind, explaining why toughlove is important (particularly for people on benefits) and why we’ll all grow as a result of it, or some such crap. It’s just a pity we don’t see the same toughlove being applied to the financial sector, or, say, to the senior management teams at G4S and Serco for £50m worth of fraud, for example (although I’m sure the fraud inquiry there will see any wrongs righted. Ahem). Some serious bloody toughlove is in order there, but yeah – it’s taking a while. I can only imagine that the political class can’t stomach the idea of seeing Serco’s board in floods of tears as the company is reduced to its last millions. I can’t remember seeing Fred Goodwin standing outside a courthouse bawling as owed coins were wrung out of him. A bit of toughlove for tax avoiders would also be welcome, but it’s pretty clear that we’re all going to die waiting for that one.

In the meantime, we get toughlove for people for whom the rules do apply and are made to apply. There’s plenty of toughlove around for them. I saw that toughlove in all its glory outside the front of Leeds magistrates on Thursday and have to say I didn’t think much of it. It looked like good old-fashioned bullying to me – frightening and humiliating for people in equal parts.

I talked to people who were in tears about their council tax bills. I spoke at length, for example, to a woman called Claire who cried for a lot of the morning. She was on employment and support allowance, had a teenage daughter who was still living at home and studying, and said that she would have to cut her food money to pay her council tax bill – which, with costs, now stood at about £200.

She had gone into the court building with her summons letter and come out having agreed to pay £12.50 a fortnight – no small sum for her out of her benefit. “I didn’t know whether to come here or not, but I didn’t know if they could arrest you [if you didn’t attend]. Do you know if they can arrest you?” She said she’d tried to make an appointment at her local Citizens’ Advice Bureau to get some advice, but the CAB was so busy with people with similar “welfare reform” problems that she hadn’t been able to make contact. People also told me that queues outside local CAB offices formed early these days and that it wasn’t easy to get appointments, because demand is high. The Leeds Hands Off Our Homes campaigning group was out the front – there are lawyers and people with knowledge of the social security system in their number, so they at least were in a position to give some support.

But there is a major issue here and you find it all over. People are isolated and their options for help are dwindling as advice centres are cut – and simultaneously overwhelmed by skyrocketing numbers of people who are being hit with a whole range of rubbish: the bedroom tax, council tax benefit cuts, workfare, problems with Atos, the shift from disability living allowance to the personal independence payment. People have a lot of worries and a lot of questions and nobody to ask a lot of the time.

A young man called David showed me his summons letter – he’d built up council tax arrears of about £130 and it seemed that another £60 or so in costs had been slapped on the top of it. “Is this the place that you can ask about your council tax bill?” he asked. “I can’t afford to pay it.” Another man called Mark said he was not going to pay. He couldn’t afford to, but he’d also decided not to. He didn’t think the process was legal and wanted to know more about his rights before he tried to pay up.

And who is doing what here, exactly?
As the morning went on, too, questions were asked by people going in and out of the building re: exactly who they were seeing and how their summons were being processed. People said that they were seeing council officers once inside and being told to agree payment terms on “outstanding” council tax. Which was an interesting report and had me imagining a variety of unacceptable scenarios – including one where people were sent heavy-handed court summons letters, were frightened by those letters into turning up at court and then herded in and off to agree repayment terms with the council at the very last minute in the hope of avoiding further fines, or even jail. Those letters certainly had people thinking that they were about to find themselves up before a judge. Finding yourself before a judge and finding yourself before a council officer are two slightly different things and we need to know why those letters were sent, who people were expecting to see and who they ended up in front of.

I’ve asked the council for more on this. If councils are going to hunt less-than-rich people down like dogs and to punish them brutally for a financial crisis that they didn’t cause, let’s see exactly how they’re doing it. We need a lot more clarity on way that these persecutions are being handled and how these large numbers of people are being “processed” through the system. Who exactly is processing this number of “outstanding” payments and how do they expect to manage non-payment as it worsens? Which it will, as we all know. I’m a shit mathematician, but even I have worked out that people who have no money now are unlikely to have money further down the track, especially if they’re already in debt and wearing court costs that they can’t afford. (An interesting aside – the home country just introduced legislation where benefits are cut if people have arrest warrants for outstanding fines. I can see that kind of crap making its way over the ocean here. Such is our punitive age). We also need to know who is and isn’t being slapped with a liability order as these things “progress.” And we need to know what the big plan is if people can’t afford to pay. Will “outstanding” payments ultimately be deducted from benefits? – that sort of carry-on does appear to be Leeds council policy and there was a lot of concern about it on Thursday. And what happens to people who didn’t appear at court on summons day?

And probably at the top of the pile – how long and how far do councils like Leeds plan to turn the screw on people on this one?

Anyway, I rang the council a goodly number of times on Thursday afternoon and couldn’t get through to their press office (their twitter account also seems to be down https://twitter.com/lccpressoffice). I finally got through on Friday morning and sent questions, which they were going to answer by Friday afternoon. They didn’t, so I followed it up. Monday, they said. I said how about an answer to the “who were people seeing when they went into the court building” question. It all went very quiet after that. Monday it is, then.

What bollocks this all is.

Update Monday 29 July:

So, after a fair bit of nagging, I finally got a response from the council. It’s not good and I can’t tell you how angry this makes me.

To start with – it was indeed Leeds City Council who issued the summonses. They issued a whopping 3000 for last week’s hearing (which makes me wonder if they issued another tranche for the 1 August hearing. I’ll find out, because those numbers are important). They’re important because they are such big numbers – and they are summonses that were, by the council’s own admission, issued predominantly for people who have been hit by the council tax benefit cut that came in earlier this year. That “change” has led to this terrible problem and this hounding of people who have no money through the courts. Let’s not forget that the people being targeted here are people on low wages, or on benefits – that’s why they got council tax benefit – so they are least able to absorb this kind of blow. But they are the people who are being hunted and abused in austerity. The financial sector caused the recession and the political class enables the ongoing slaughter of social security – but it’s the disabled, sick, unemployed and poorly-paid who are paying.

And paying and paying. In a stroke of “genius”, Leeds council and the courts (this happens all over, of course) have whacked court costs on top of the outstanding council tax sums – the “logic” here being that people who can’t afford to pay their new council tax bills will of course be in a position to pay £60+ in court costs as well. “I’ll have to take it out of my food money,” ESA claimant Claire told me on Thursday, as you will have noted above. The thing is – she WILL have to take it out of her food money. She has no other money. She has no alternative. She was in tears and, once inside the courthouse, had agreed to pay £12.50 towards that bill out of her benefit, just to get the council and courts off her back.

These are vindictive times we have here, my friends. And at a jolly old Labour council, too. Isn’t that fun. Mark my words – the political class is more than happy to pressure people for money until they go hungry.

Regarding the officers people saw when they turned up with their summonses: they did indeed see council officers. The court summons frightened people into turning up at court. Once, there, said the council, council staff were there to “resolve any queries and make arrangements to prevent further recovery action being necessary.” Right. The purpose of the day, though, was for the council to apply for liability orders and council officers were also inside making “arrangements” with people to pay. That would explain people coming out of the courts saying that they’d agreed to pay a certain sum every week, or fortnight, or so on.

Liability orders are dreadful. Liability orders, as the council puts it, “give us the right to demand information about you and give us certain powers which we can use to obtain payment.” That is oppressive. Those “certain powers” include taking money from people’s low pay, or small benefits and sending the bailiffs round to uplift your dwindling possessions.

Remember how I told you earlier in this piece that New Zealand just introduced legislation where benefits are cut if people have arrest warrants for outstanding fines? You’ll get that here soon – people having their tiny incomes slashed, because they’ve ended up with fines and court costs which they only ended up with because they had no money in the first place and were not able to absorb “reforms” like the bedroom tax and council tax benefit cuts.

Isn’t that charming. I hope Fred Goodwin’s happy. Hell – I hope the whole political class is happy. Doubtless it is. How often to you get to kick 3000 poor people in the face at once? What fun. What a gift.