English Councils - Are they all a bit thick?
By RieRie
@RieRie (820)
August 15, 2009 2:31pm CST
I received a letter today from the council today, 1 for overpaid benefit they want back and one revised bill, now the revised bill they worked out I can afford about £10 a month, however the overpaid they want about £200 this month.
What I would like to know is, is it just me, or do you think that they should have added the overpayments to the revised bill as installments, as the bills both came in the same envelope!!
for example I would normally pay £10 but I would pay £20 until the overpayments are paid back.
I have actually emailed the council to see if they can do this logical thing. So we'll find out.
1 person likes this
1 response
@pumpkinjam (8539)
• United Kingdom
15 Aug 09
I don't think ALL English councils are thick. Perhaps just most of them! Certainly where we are they don't seem to be able to understand anything. You probably haven;t even had an overpayment and if you have, I don't believe they have any right to claim it back from you if you had given them correct information. Although I'm not sure about that.
I have had letters like that from the local council where you get one which says "we've decided you can afford £xx" and then another letter saying "You must pay £xxx right now". I don't know if they realise what they're doing. Well, we've even had letters telling us that they've decided we can afford to pay so much to them even when everyone else in the world could have worked out that we couldn't but then still had threatening letters (despite attempting to resolve the matter) telling us we must pay now.
When I was in arrears with the council, I offered to pay it back in instalments but because they'd decided we had more money coming in that we actually did have, they just said we had to pay the ridiculous amount they wanted plus all of the arrears regardless of how many times I told them that we just didn't have it to pay.
@RieRie (820)
•
16 Aug 09
They can claim it back because even though my circumstances didn't change until January, they worked things out from my Christmas wage slips (mostly), my sick pay and my P60, so they don't take into account that I was doing overtime instead of my usual hours, but as the job is flexible there isn't a part that says Basic Hours and then Overtime, it all counts as Basic, so they counted that I was getting about £20-£30 more than my actual basic hours.
Well I sent an email, which I think is patronising, so they should understand, detailing exactly what they said in both letters and doing all the sums for them even adding £10 to £8, just in case their computers can't do it, as it is never a human that messes things up, always computers that work magically by themselves.
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