3. What legal advice has the Counsel General provided to the Welsh Government in relation to prosecution for non-payment of council tax? OAQ51701

I thank the Member for the question. The decision whether or not to prosecute in relation to non-payment of council tax lies, of course, with the local authority and not with the Welsh Government. So, local authorities and local magistrates will seek their own legal advice when they need it. That said, the Welsh Government clearly has an interest in ensuring that council tax arrears are managed appropriately and the Cabinet Secretary for Finance and Local Government, as he then was, published research on this at the end of 2017.

A recent judicial review case in relation to a woman committed to prison for non-payment found that the overall system for enforcement in Wales is not unfair but that some individual magistrates courts' decisions have been wrong.

Unfortunately, that judgment has been taken by some people to mean that paying council tax is optional, and that if you don't pay it, nothing can be done to you, so you might as well not pay it. And social media has been awash with people making statements like that. So, will the Counsel General discuss the impact of the recent court case regarding the legality of imprisonment for non-payment of council tax with his counterpart at Westminster?

I'm absolutely happy to discuss further. Just to be clear, the decision found that the system itself is not unfair. There were two issues in the proceedings: one related to the individual decisions of the magistrates' courts on committal to prison, and one was whether the system was capable of being fair. And actually the Welsh Ministers successfully defended their position in relation to the fairness of the system. But, as I indicated in my answer a minute ago, the individual decisions of magistrates' courts have been wrong, either because they've misunderstood the law, or because the law has been misapplied in individual cases, where people have been committed to prison or been expected to pay back council tax over too long a period.

As he will know, of course, the magistrates' courts and their training is not devolved to Wales, and his question acknowledges that. I am aware that the Lord Chief Justice has provided additional guidance and training to magistrates' benches on this particular issue since the litigation began. But on his broader question of the payment of council tax, obviously, there are households struggling to cope in the current financial circumstances, and the research that the Cabinet Secretary for Finance published at the end of last year, which he is currently considering, had at its heart, I guess, the objective of understanding the current practice in relation to recovery, and how that relates to individual circumstances.