According to stats released by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government in 2024 the total amount of council tax and NNDR outstanding was in the region of £8.4 billion.
This increased level of debt, comes as no real surprise as Local Authorities continue to balance resource and funding issues, forcing increases in council tax and citizens continue to deal with escalating cost of living issues.
Council tax and NNDR debt however, are just two areas of debt Local Authorities are responsible for collecting. Some online research provided no real up-to-date figures associated with the other debts Local Authorities are tasked with recovering. These include parking charges, licenses, planning applications, waste collections, overpayment of benefits, adult social care and sundry debts. This suggests that there is very little visibility of the total level of debt owed to Local Authorities across the board both at an individual and collective level.
This is hardly surprising as typically the responsibility for these collections are spread out across multiple teams and departments working independently and in isolation to each other, with little overall understanding of the level of debt owed across the entire council. There is no central point at which all that information is pulled together to collectively address everything that is outstanding. In addition there will be significant duplication of effort and resource and the associated costs that go with this, in attempts to collect these debts.
Addressing Multi-debt debtors
A typical scenario councils might encounter is when trying to collect council tax for a particular property but unbeknownst to them, the occupier has also racked up parking debt, unpaid permits and unpaid planning applications. They effectively have four different types of debt with the same council, receiving four different notifications, from four different departments all with the same goal of receiving payment. Even though the council tax team may have set up an arrangement, the other departments will typically have no knowledge of this and it is at this point, we can start to see how a ‘single view of debt’ solution could be used to address some of the issues this creates.
Fusion – Single view of debt
Destin Solutions developed Fusion, a powerful data matching solution back in 2015. One of its main applications is its ability to take debt data from multiple different systems and present all of this disparate data in a singular view. By combining debt information from a number of different data sources held across different systems and from within different departments, an Authority gains unique insight into exactly who owes what, the type of debt or debts owed at an individual level and a whole range of other customer information.
In one recent implementation we have been able to provide reports on the total number of individual debts owed to the Authority, the number of instances where people have multiple debts across different areas and the value of these collectively and individually. It has proven to be a real game changer for that Authority giving them a better understanding of their debtors and the opportunity to reconsider their approach to multi-debt collections.
A single contact and reference for all customer debt
Using a single view of debt solution in this way will not only save Local Authorities time and resource in terms of duplication of work by multiple departments, it is a much better customer experience. Ideally the debtor only receives one contact from the council with a singular reference number that consolidates all their debt and one payment plan to repay that cumulative debt. It can also tie in more effectively with an Authorities’ corporate debt policy, by having a consolidated debt profile and payment plan for that debt to match the policy.
Following considerable demand from Local Authority clients, Destin Solutions have gone on to significantly enhance our single view of debt solution since Fusion was first launched. Incorporating proprietary data matching, machine learning and powerful search tools the latest iteration of Fusion allows us to store, search and analyse huge volumes of data quickly and in near real time, whilst learning from user-based decisions about the matches they make. This enables us to provide enhanced debtor profiles quickly and with a level of detail that Authorities have never really seen before. Data can be broken down in numerous ways and can provide real insight, for example deprivation levels by physical location and number of different debt types and amounts an individual debtor has. These kind of insights help Authorities get a much better understanding of the overall scope of debt they are dealing with and identify trends and patterns that will help with future forecasting and budgeting requirements.
In conclusion, implementing a single view of debt solution can result in significantly lower costs associated with debt collection by consolidating multi-debt debtor information, you can pursue a one contact strategy and streamline the entire collections process. You can also reduce costs associated with carrying our credit reference checks, checking one debtor for the multiple debts they may have, rather than four separate checks being undertaken by each of the different departments a debt is owed to.
Find out more about Fusion our single view of debt solution >
