Council Tax closed accounts - credits, over-payments and totals for tax years 21/22 and 22/23
Case reference FOI2023/01614
Published 27 October 2023
Request
I am writing to you under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 to request data on the total amount of credits and over-payments (£) held in CLOSED council tax accounts by the council between the tax years for 2021/22 and 2022/23.
I am also requesting the total number of such accounts in the same period.
Please provide the information in the form of a simple table like the example below:
Tax year
Number of closed accounts in credit
Total credits/ over-payments (£)
2021/22
e.g. 508
e.g. £54,678.09
2022/23
If it is not possible to provide a breakdown of credits by financial year and they are instead only recorded on a rolling basis, could I get the total value of current credits (£) and the total number of accounts in credit as of the current date.
I am also requesting the main reasons why residents have overpaid on their council tax during these periods.
Response
I am writing to you under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 to request data on the total amount of credits and over-payments (£) held in CLOSED council tax accounts by the council between the tax years for 2021/22 and 2022/23.
I am also requesting the total number of such accounts in the same period.
Please provide the information in the form of a simple table like the example below:
Tax year
Number of closed accounts in credit
Total credits/ over-payments (£)
2021/22
e.g. 508
e.g. £54,678.09
2022/23
If it is not possible to provide a breakdown of credits by financial year and they are instead only recorded on a rolling basis, could I get the total value of current credits (£) and the total number of accounts in credit as of the current date.
I am also requesting the main reasons why residents have overpaid on their council tax during these periods.
This information is not held in a form that would enable it to be located, retrieved and extracted within the Appropriate Time Limit which equates to 18 hours as defined by the Freedom of Information and Data Protection (Appropriate Limits and Fees) Regulations 2004.
For the final query, our electronic reporting systems are unable to run a report for this information. To ascertain the data requested, officers would need to manually check individual files for this information. An initial search has shown that 601 files would need to be checked for this information, and it is estimated that it would take 2 minutes to check each file. Once the details had been identified this would need to be noted and once all files had been checked in this way, the total figures requested could be calculated, etc.
This would at a conservative estimate take at least 20 hours to complete. Where the Limit is exceeded Public Authorities are not obliged to supply the information requested by virtue of S12 of the Act. Please take this letter as a refusal notice under S17 of the Act.
However, within the 18 hour limit, we can provide answers for the number of closed accounts in credit and the total value of credit for the financial years requested. Please advise us if this is something you require.
Documents
This is Herefordshire Council's response to a freedom of information (FOI) or environmental information regulations (EIR) request.
You can browse our other responses or make a new FOI request.