I am trying to help a friend of mine with some real problem she is having with her CTB and the council.

In late 2003 she became acutely ill with mental health problems (depression, anxiety, boarder line agrophobic etc). She applied for CTB in 2003 and until now assumed she had it. In 2004 she received 3 letters requesting occupier information and on all three she sent them back saying she had CTB and ticked the box on the back of the from stating she is classed as severe mental illness (which she is).

In Feb she had a council tax demand for just under £1000 for 2004 and another for about the same for 2005. I phoned the council on her behalf and it turned out they had no idea anyone was living there and no record of CTB for her.

Part of her problems are that she has serious memory impairment. She can literaly talk you today and have no memory of it tomorrow. Hence, when she made her original application, after a day or so she really did forget about it, hence she did not follow it up because medically she could not.

In May 2005 she applied for CTB again and has been assessed and awarded full CTB from 16th May 2005. However, they council has refused to backdate it as they say she does not have good cause and have also taken out a liability order.

Currently I am getting her to appeal the CTB backdating decision, but the council see to be ignoring her serious and long term problems. She is living in constant fear of baillifs calling. She is living on IS, IB, DLA which is just enough - knife edge. The council want to apply for an attachment of benefits and the reduction with ruin her.

So, some help please!

What is the best way to appeal? Does she have a case? She has been medically assessed as someone who had great trouble understanding the world around her and can not cope with forms etc - it seems the council have not and will not take into account she can not fill out even the simplest from. Can someone please help.

Thank you.

In 2004 she returned 3 letters to the LA, clearly stating she suffered from a seevere mental illness. In this LA, this would have alerted us to the possibility that she may have qualified for exemption under the SMI rules. It would have (should have) alerted them to the fact that they may very well experience problems with claims for rebate - again, in this LA the details would have been passed to the Welfare rights team. In addition, the computer record would have been flagged to show that she may require a visiting officer in the future for verification etc.

Where, for genuine reasons, there is monies outsyanding from a previous period, we will negotiate with the recoveries section to arrive at a weekly repayment figure that the client can afford. However, in these circumstances, I think she has a good case for backdating: when the LA got the letters in 2004, did they not send out a claim form, followed by reminder letters? .............

Does the LA in this case not have WR team?

Sadly another council seemingly oblivious to its own best interests!

It will take them forever to collect this debt through benefits attachment, though I appreciate the hardship the deductions will cause your client.

There is a problem with backdating as such, in that it can only be for a maximum of 52 weeks. However if there is evidence of a claim which was not acted upon (such as an indictation on an occupier form) then that would be enough to indicate that claim of some sort actually existed and was unactioned through official error. In that situation they can pay from when they got that without even having to call it backdating.

I do not understand why the LA does not just backdate at least as far as it is able to, and look at whether it can pay from even further back on the basis I have described above. Mental health problems affecting memory would seem pretty compelling as 'good cause' to me!

Whilst I hate to be the one to suggest it, if those occupier forms still exist somewhere and the LA did absolutely nothing about the information given in them, then a complaint to the Ombudsman might be in order.

If your friend has been getting IS for the whole of the period concerned you should check that the DWP sent the notification to the LA. If they did not then ask them to do it now.The LA should then be able to backdate the CTB without too much trouble as the money comes from a different 'pot' when it's passported by entitlement to IS.(I think!)