Council Tax is Fraud

This post has been compiled using my own research and the comments at the bottom of this article: https://www.herefordtimes.com/news/23773214.herefordshires-council-tax-non-payment-problem-growing/#comments-anchor

I have been researching Council Tax for two years now and on reading the comments at the bottom of the above article, it was my opinion that they were really well researched.

Last year, when I spoke to the Revenues Manager at my local council regarding my own non-payment of council tax she repeated like a parrot ‘everybody has to pay council tax’. But my research has found that this false statement is protected and supported by a web of lies, fraud, and collusion carried out by the Police, Magistrates, and council workers.

Until enough people stop paying and explain to others their reasons for not paying many people will continue to be defrauded.

No Lawful Obligation to Pay

It’s not a matter of people getting away without paying, it’s really a matter that there is no lawful obligation to pay council tax; as an examination of the 1992 Local Government Finance Act (LGFA1992), on which the tax is based, reveals.

The council should be justifying its claimed right to charge and enforce the tax but no council will tell us the Acts, Laws, Statutes and Regulations which sanction their demands for the tax and its subsequent enforcement through the Courts. The reason they don’t answer our questions is because the LGFA1992 obliges the Council to ‘demand payment’ but nowhere in the Act, or anywhere else, is there any lawful obligation for us to pay. The court and the Council have colluded to perpetuate the myth that we ‘have to pay council tax’.

Adult & Social Care

The question to ask your council is, “what percentage of the council tax precept goes to Adult and Children’s Social Care?”. In Dorset it is allegedly 75%, however, we would need an independed forensic audit to prove what is being spent as they cannot be trusted. If this burden were removed from councils and taken from a combination of VAT and corporation tax (income tax is also unlawful but that is for another post) the council tax bill would be a quarter of what we are currently paying.

Liability Orders

Debt Collection Agents (DCAs) are private limited companies that are not authorised by the court, and additionally do not have the right to collect a tax. They often lie by trying to hide behind the Local Government Finance Act, but this only authorises councils to raise a tax, not third party private companies.

The collection of council tax by councils is the exercise of its statutory function. There is no legislation that authorises councils to use private debt collectors to collect council tax or to delegate its powers as a billing authority to a private corporation.

DCAs will say that they have the right to harrass non-payers of council taxt because they have a Liability Order. On investigation however, it appears that this order does not exist and hasn’t done for almost 20 years.

The Council fraudulently claims that the ‘Notice of Liability Order’ they send after their fake hearing is the same as the ‘Liability Order’ that they do not have. We should send the DCA a Data Subject Access Request, which must be answered in 30 days pursuant to the Data Protection Act 2018, requesting a court-certifed copy of an actual Court Order, which they are obliged to have in order to enforce an alleged debt. With the Order there is no proof of debt and therefore no real ‘debt’.

If you write to the Court requesting a certfied copy of the Memorandum of Entry they will likely write back to you requesting a payment of £20.00, which is also fraudulent because the council have already paid for the alleged Liabilty Order. Ask them to confirm, in writing, that the council hasn’t paid for the Liability Order. If the Court does actually send you something it will likely be pursuant to Section 68 of the Magistrates Court Rules, we should be specifically asking for something compliant with Section 66. If they can only supply a S68 ask them why. Ask them how it’s possible to have a register of events without a record of conviction. Ask them for the specific statutory instrument that specifies one can exist without the other.

Portsmouth City Council & Portsmouth Magistrates Court Commit Fraud

The collusion and profiteering between the Council and Courts has reached epic proportions in Portsmouth, Hampshire, with a man having being arrested last week for after asking Hampshire Constabulary why they were allowing the hearing for Liaiblity Orders to go ahead when the Council and court had, only the week before, been put on notice by a group of unhappy Hampshire men and women.

It has become evident that Portsmouth Magistrates Court is in collusion with Portsmouth City Council, and now Hampshire Constabulary are in collusion with them both, protecting them by stating that they had closed the case of fraud without any investigation after only a week. However, it has since come to light that the case hasn’t been closed – more lies.

It was reported to the Police that Portsmouth City Council and Portsmouth Magistrates Court had committed fraud when Portsmouth City Council asked 6,000 non payers of council tax not to turn up to the Liability Order hearing. Magistrates sitting on 12th July; Mrs L Less, Mr A Day, and Ms D Johnson, then awarded costs of £125 each for not turning up, netting a profit of £750,000 in one day.

The fact that the Police and the media are not interested in investigating this fraud against the people shows that our public servants are not serving the people.

This story was sent to The Daily Mail, The Mirror, The Sun, and the local papers in Portsmouth: The News, Daily Echo, Hampshire Live, and The Star & Crescent. The group emailed and followed them all up and none of the journalists came back for further information.

Watch this video shot outside Portsmouth Magistrates Court on Wednesday 6th September as the Hampshire Constabulary refuse to arrest any of the Magistrates who are repeating the procedure on another few thousand non payers of council tax with the intention of making another £750,000 profit.

If Portsmouth City Council hire the court once a month with 6,000 non payers of council tax per hearing they will net £9,000,000 per annum from some of the poorest members of Portsmouth.

As the cost of living crises escalates, Portsmouth City Council and Portsmouth Magistrates Court certainly seem to know how to keep their income stream. Read the full story here: https://gab.com/PortsmouthDataBreach

Summons

The case number that refers to the Hearing at which the Order was supposedly granted, and printed on your summons, is not even a court case number. It is, in fact, nothing to do with the Court but the database reference number for your home on the Council computer system. The whole Court action was completely fraudulent and you should be demanding the return of all the council tax you have ever paid, plus compound interest at 8% per annum over the past 20 years.

The form that were to be submitted to the court by the council in application of a Liability Order was removed from Law on October 1st, 2003 and never replaced. This is published in The Council Tax Handbook, the manual the council uses to set is tax issuing and collection policy. So the councils are full aware that they are breaking the law by fraudulently claiming they have a Liability Order.

The reality is that the Council is obliged to set an annual budget and to issue demands for payment, but the fact that payment is ‘voluntary’ is never disclosed. It’s pretended that it is mandated by the LGFA1992, but that has always been a lie to make the public believe they have to pay.

Conditional Acceptance

Nine people from the Herefordshire Common Law group challenged the Council using what is called a ‘Conditional Acceptance’, which is a written notification that they are happy to pay the tax on the proviso that the Council proves they are legally and Lawfully obliged to pay it. More than a year later no proof has been provided and what is more, since the same nine people maintained their challenge for a second year, the first unpaid year has not been added to the second year’s tax bill, for the simple reason that a genuine debt obligation cannot be ‘proved’ and therefore no debt exists.

In June this year, a member of the group filed fourteen written Defence documents that have been adjourned to be heard at Kidderminster Court on September 26th. A similar situation arose last year where cases were transferred, supposedly, to a higher court but were in fact heard in another magistrates Court by the Council’s pet judge, Ian Strongman who, in order to railroad judgement for the Council imprisoned me, supposedly for contempt, to prevent me from speaking on behalf of seven people who were under conditional acceptance.

He was unlawfully and illegally detained in the courthouse cells, following the police refusing to arrest him because there had been no crime, and the rogue judge instructed court security staff to arrest and detain him, despite the fact that they do not have powers of arrest.

The Council’s pet judge later convicted him of contempt of court in an extraordinary unrecorded and unlawful star-chamber private trial. He subsequently appealed this judgement and on July 7th I was exonerated when his contempt conviction was quashed by the Crown Court in Birmingham.

In 2022 a total of nine challenges were made; this year there are over thirty. Next year, the group confidently expect there to be hundreds.

The main problem for Councils, is the fact that they have all been breaking the law for nearly thirty years (it’s now part of their process) and we, as members of the public, have failed to challenge them to operate under their own laws which they have been breaking with impunity, or making up on the fly. However, this law-breaking has now strayed from the civil into the criminal realm and Councils are now desperately trying to cover-it-up, before, no doubt going on to claim ‘we was only doing our jobs guv’ having blatantly engaged in racketeering at a level that would make the Mafia look like rank amateurs.

You may all think I am crazy, like the Magistrates all nervously exclaimed as they left Court last Tuesday, having committed around £750,000 of fraud by rubber-stamping over 500 fake Liability Orders. I call their comments projection, though, because they ‘know’ exactly who the ‘crazy’ ones really are. Following asking for their names on more than five occasions during the hearing, which they are obliged to reveal, they refused to identify themselves, such was their desire to hide behind the skirts of a corrupt court. Now, you may consider that what I have written here as being incendiary, and I agree it probably is. Maybe the Court or the Council should now send lawyers and writs to sue me for libel and all sorts of other nefarious crimes, but the fact is that I would welcome that as I would welcome the opportunity to cross-examine them in a court of record, so I know they will chicken out of this challenge, which will only help to further prove my point. Council Tax is voluntary – there is no obligation to pay it, and the clock is ticking!

Consolidated Fund

Like VAT, Income tax, Fuel taxes, Road taxes, Insurance tax, Energy tax, Capital gains tax, right through to Death tax, Council tax is just another source of revenue feeding the Consolidated Fund of the Treasury and the Bank of England. Nothing is funded locally and we have no control over the money the Treasury returns to our local communities to fund ambulances, police and waste disposal. We also have no control over the schemes our local money is spent on.

Central government dictates how much our Council can allocate to road repairs, for instance, and once that money runs out no more can be allocated until the next annual budget is approved. When the government says install 5G masts, surveillance cameras, facial recognition etc. to boost the control mechanisms government needs to control and manage us, our local Council are the ones tasked with putting these things in place. Did you or anyone you know demand all the CCTV and the ANPR cameras to be installed to monitor and surveil us. I didn’t and I bet you didn’t either. Did you demand all the cycle lanes, road restrictions, planned LTNs and ULEZ zones? No.

All of this is national policy and local authorities are instructed to carry it out, or face funding reductions. For more information, read the comment I included on the ‘Consolidated Fund’ and the amount of our Council-raised tax that actually gets returned for us to spend locally – estimated to be around 30% of what the Council collects from us. The rest is used to fund the ship of state and we are the cash-cows being milked to pay for it all, with no choice or control of where and what it gets spent on.

Not one penny collected in Council Tax ends up in the coffers of our Council. This is a common myth we are told to make us believe that by not paying we a bad people. It’s just another lie. Every penny collected in UK tax goes straight to central government and directed to the Bank of England to what is named the Consolidated Fund. This bank account was created in 1816 under the Consolidated Fund Act 1816, where ALL taxes collected in the UK are deposited, without exception. The money that funds local services, managed by the Council, is money that Central government allows to flow back to the county via the Treasury and decided by the cabinet office. It bears no relation to what is collected as around 70% of Council tax collected is retained by the Treasury.

IWhat was formerly collected, known as ‘rates’ was collected and invested locally and used to fund council services, but all that changed in March 1993 after the introduction of the Council ‘Tax’ by the 1992 Local Government Finance Act. How do you feel now, knowing that 70p of every Pound you pay to your Council goes to City of London private pension funds and to the banks in interest on borrowing, and only 30p gets returned to fund local services?

Do you now understand how central government holds all the purse-strings and can dictate where the money can be spent, allocated not through need, but through an annual ‘budget’ (otherwise termed as an annual spending estimate). Remember, you have already paid up to 40% income tax plus national Insurance on the money you have left to pay council tax with, and then on your council tax 70% demanded is effectively tax paid to the state corporation. But’ it’s all OK because the Council empty your bins every week – or is that only every fortnight now!

Consolidated Fund Act 1816, CHAPTER 98 56 Geo 3: An Act to unite and consolidate into One Fund all the Public Revenues of Great Britain and Ireland, and to provide for the Application thereof to the General Service of the United Kingdom. [1st July 1816]

https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Geo3/56/98/contents

Remember that the United Kingdom is not a country, but a corporation and a legal jurisdiction, so we are paying our money to a private limited company. Another deception.