Elderly woman claims she was summoned to court in council tax dispute despite paying

An elderly resident in Bury has blasted her local council for ‘negligence’ after she received a court summons for not paying her council tax despite sending in two cheques.

The Prestwich resident, who has asked not to be named, said she sent a £120.04 cheque off to Bury Council to cover her council tax in April, but a month later received a letter from the local authority informing her that she had not yet paid her monthly tax.

The 88-year-old said she then wrote back to the council with a further cheque for the full year’s amount as she didn’t ‘want any more aggravation’ and hoped it would resolve the issue.

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But she then received another letter from Bury Council informing that as they had yet to receive her payment, she would be summoned to court in July over the matter.

“I tried multiple times to contact them on the phone and in letters and I just got no response,” the woman told the M.E.N. "My son even sent them an email saying I had sent them two cheques and got no reply."

In an attempt to resolve the issue, the resident then contacted Bury South MP Christian Wakeford about the matter.

“It was only after my local MP contacted them that I was able to get a response from the council,” she explained. “They told me that they had in fact received my two cheques and had sent them off to be cashed by the bank but, by that point, I had already cancelled them.”

The council later apologised to the resident and cancelled the court summons after she paid the council tax over the phone. She said she was told in a letter that the council had been experiencing ‘some operational issues with the banking of cheques received over the