Be Excellent To Each Other

5.15pm

*ring ring* "Hello, this is CUS!"
"Who?"
"Er, nevermind. Hi Mum!"
"Hi. Er, you know when I picked up those boxes of stuff earlier?"
"Yes?"
"I accidentally picked up some letters. Most of them are for those women* but there's one here from the council."
"Uh oh..."
"They want £213 from you before tomorrow, or they'll see you at 9.30am in court tomorrow."
"What?!"
"Half of it is just charges, too."

* I receive approximately 20 letters a day. 3 will be for me (credit card offers), and maybe 1 a week will be an actual important bill. The rest are for four women who lived here in the past, including one Joycelyn Cruickshank, splendidly.

Why?

Yes, that's the important bit.

And, obviously, the bit that useless letter is least likely to tell you.

This doesn't have anything to do with the suicide thread, does it?

Apparently the council haven't received my money for the past 3 months. Something has seemingly 'happened' to my direct debit, vexingly. Very vexing, really, because they've since sent me two red letters, the 2nd of which is the 'We're going to court!' one, neither of which I had seen due to a cavalcade of Other People's Mail.

Brilliantly, we only found out at all through pure chance, and then it was about 15 minutes after the offices close, the day before I'm due in court. At 9.30. Their phone-lines open at 9.

jonarob: Yes. I created both of them.

I knew it!

Doesn't seem like much you can do bit turn up then. I assume it is for Council Tax? The court fees will be payable on top of what you owe them. If you have the money then just appear, explain what has happened and offer to pay.

If you ignore it and do nothing however then the Magistrate will probably issue an arrest warrant. Which means having to give yourself 'up' to a court bailiff and pay even more. So there's no point in not doing so.

The problem is that I am due elsewhere at 9.30 tomorrow, and in fact, am going to Sweden tomorrow. I can certainly phone them and pay them, but turning up to say so is rather trickier.

Well you can give it a go. Ultimately it just comes down to how much you want to pay.

Nothing. I have no money. Well, I can pay them, but then I'm just screwed a week or two later instead.

Call them at 9am, tell them you've only just seen the letters last night and ask if you can arrange some sort of repayment. A little each month on top of you normal payment. Try and find out why the DD was cancelled too, it could have been some stupid arse from their end.

I too recieved a threatening letter from the council this week telling me they were taking me to court, you wouldn't believe how many times I've arranged payments and it's just not gone through, I end up keep on making payments over the phone, after this week it's hopefully sorted though!

Good luck with it CUS anyway, I hope you get it sorted quickly, I'm sure you don't want it hanging over you this weekend!

I've had a few council tax court summons in my time. I've always managed to call them to avert disaster. Normally if you call them they're reasonable, if a little thick sometimes. It took me half an hour to explain to someone that I had paid the right amount. Eventually she passed me over to her manager, who confirmed that I had, and that the nasty letters would stop.

They credited the amount I had paid to my countil tax bill, but forgot to remove the 'fine' for taking so long to pay. It took me a while to explain that one, too.



Hope all goes well for you.

Hoorah! To my amazement, all is fine. My clever Mum found an automated billing line and made the payment on my behalf at about 6am. I called up at 9 and they said 'As long as the payment was for the full amount then that's it.'

*breathes* Thank fuck for that! Now I get back to my other disasters, and continue packing for going to Sweden later

Feel free to use this thread for other legal calamaties.

Hurrah!

Enjoy meatballs, and open sandwiches!

Glad it's all sorted CUS

That's a jolly nice mum you got there.

Mums, aren't they great, creating your existence and everything! Brilliant!


Well, maybe some are more brilliant than others, thinking about the two extremes of ace and yeurgh in the Lewie P thread.

Absolutely, yes It also helps that she works as a carer, and is awake from 5am every morning anyway, and I've already transferred the money back to her, I should maybe say!

Glad to hear it's all sorted.

Enjoy Sweden, send us a postcard.

Well, not a legal calamity as such but we did have a nice meeting with the Housing Officer over our noisy, violent neighbours. 50 pages worth of incident notes off the blog helped but not as much as them turning their TV on - which we could hear every word, through six inches of soundproofing.

I was sort of hoping to hear the tale of CUS "beating" a murder "rap" at the "courthouse". But this'll do.
Have a good time in Sweden. It is ace.