A report by the Money Advice Trust as part of their ‘Stop The Knock’ campaign reveals that Thurrock Council used bailiffs over 6,000 times last year. The figures in the report were obtained by the use of a Freedom of Information Act request. See here for the full story on Your Thurrock: Report reveals Thurrock Council called the bailiffs over 6,000 times last year – http://www.yourthurrock.com/2017/11/17/report-reveals-thurrock-council-called-bailiffs-6000-times-last-year/

In a period where more and more people are getting into financial difficulties as a result of a toxic combination of stagnating or declining pay, increases in short term or zero hours employment contracts and benefits ‘reforms’ (cuts) as a result of austerity, you would have thought that a local authority such as Thurrock would be taking all of this into consideration before resorting to the use of bailiffs. Thurrock Council make a lot of noise about the need to protect their revenue streams in an age of permanent austerity yet fail to grasp that it’s austerity that’s plunging more people into financial crisis.

With Thurrock Council being a (just about) Tory controlled authority, it would be tempting to fall into the trap of treating their attitude to people in financial difficulties as an expression of their politics. When you look at the figures in the Your Thurrock piece showing which authorities resorted to using bailiffs the most, the party political breakdown falls apart completely because one of the worst offenders is none other than the Labour controlled London Borough of Barking & Dagenham! They came in with 16,281 instructions to bailiffs to collect debts in 2016/17. If you think this number of instructions is draconian, it’s actually a decrease of 52% since 2014/15.

Working with Basildon & Southend Housing Action, we’ve come to understand that each local authority develops their own operating culture which can carry on in its own way regardless of political control. Some authorities can – given the constraints imposed upon them by the government’s austerity measures – be reasonably pragmatic and fair when it comes to recovering debts. Others seem to have a penchant for getting heavy with people from the outset. As you can see from the figures showing the use of bailiffs by local authorities in the region, there’s no consistency and there are dramatic swings from one year to the next.

Despite all of this, there are too many local authorities resorting to sending in the bailiffs almost as a default option. In theory local authorities should be the servants of the people. That’s the theory…in practice, they love lording it over us and part of that involves elements of coercion. The excessive use of bailiffs to recover debts from people who’ve hit financial difficulties is an abuse of power. It shows how local authorities are losing legitimacy in the eyes of an increasing number of people and the only way they can maintain their legitimacy is through coercion. It shows that ultimately, the local authorities who are supposed to serve us but instead, lord it over us, are no longer fit for purpose…