The local austere creditor

In recent years, local authority or “council” tax has become an increasingly severe form of problem debt in England, with local authorities sending debt collectors to the doors of over one million households annually. This chapter considers the question of how such a situation could arise – how have local authorities increasingly transformed from bastions of the Welfare State into hardened creditors? The chapter offers a historical overview of the political economy of council tax, placing the contemporary council tax debt crisis in the context of fiscal consolidation policies and the politics of austerity. It explores the origins of cuts imposed on local authority budgets by UK central government austerity policies, before considering how these developments have created a new problem of debts owed to local government. The chapter next considers the intensive debt collection methods adopted by local authorities. Using analysis of multiple datasets on council tax debt collection practices, council tax finance, and local deprivation levels, it enquires as to the extent to which aggressive debt collection approaches have been driven by budgetary pressures imposed on local governments and considers how their effects have been distributed throughout the country. The chapter aims to understand these trends in the context of financialisation and the centrality of the debt relation under neoliberalism, through which many contemporary relationships and interactions have been reduced to debtor-creditor dynamics, including those between government and citizen