Issue - meetings

To consider a report of the Head of Business Management & Challenge.

Alison McCudden, Client Finance Manager, attended to inform the Committee of the current Adult Services debt levels and also to highlight the progress made in respect of debt recovery.

Alison McCudden reported that the current client contribution invoices were valued at £16m per annum and 95.5% of invoice debt was collected within 7 weeks. There had been 900 service users who had debts outstanding and this totalled £2.1m. Good progress had been made on recovering this debt and the number cases had reduced to 800 which totalled £1.9m.

In order to build on this progress, Alison McCudden explained that the Council was exploring further initiatives to reduce the amount of debt owed. Key to this was embedding debt avoidance practice across the Directorate in order to try and ensure that service users avoided entering into debt with the Council.

In addition to debt avoidance, the Council was also developing further recovery initiatives. Alison McCudden noted that whilst the Council would always work closely and sensitively with service users to manage their payments, it was necessary to reclaim debts to ensure fairness to all those who had paid for a Council service. With this in mind, the Council was exploring the use of Small Claims Court action where debt cases were deemed suitable for final debt recovery actions.

A concern was expressed about the possible use of Bailiffs for collecting debts off vulnerable adults. Dominic Oakeshott explained that whilst the Council did need to become more rigorous in how it dealt with debt, Bailiffs and Small Claims Court action would only be used as a last resort.   

RESOLVED: That the report be noted.