Catching up? - by Richard... Wednesday, December 28, 2011

Catching up? - by Richard... Wednesday, December 28, 2011

It is always fun to see the MSM catching up. We did the story in September so to have the Grauniadonly three months behind isn't bad going. The paper does, however, illustrate the huge sums involved in the bailiff scam, with our friend Fern Silverio, the divisional director of collections and housing benefits at Harrow council, telling a conference of bailiffs this year:

Councils will be under pressure to find more income streams, and on a big contract covering all debt the bailiff can still make an enormous profit. [Harrow] council will pass debts worth around £10m to our bailiff partners. From that, they should expect to collect between £3m and £4m, which should generate fees of more than £1m.

The paper also gets the point that this money is going to be extorted from the poorest, least able members of the community, a typical response of a parasitical system that knows no moral bounds.

We thus ger a quote from John Kruse, a leading expert on bailiff law in the UK, who also works for Citizens Advice in east London. Referring to "some of the more image-aware members of the [bailiff] sector", he says they are warning that that if bailiffs are asked to pay money to councils then that has to come from somewhere. The way it is going to be produced will be by bailiffs upping the fees that they are charging or being more aggressive about the way they chase people.

Kruse adds, "The amounts that they collect at the moment are fees that they are allowed to collect by statute. That's their profit, so if the council is saying, 'We want to cut that profit now,' then it's either a case of the bailiffs making less money, which is unlikely, or they collect more money one way or another".

Despite the extremely dubious legality of this scheme, and the outright illegality of most bailiff operations, we still see no broader interest from the MSM, which is hardly surprising. But they, no doubt, will be so surprised when we start seeing dead bodies. That certainly is the direction of travel.

Either the government or the police are going to have to intervene, to rope in these cowboys, or there really is going to be murder done. But if either or both want to abandon the rule of law, then they really cannot complain if people take their law into their own hands.

The deal is they enforce the law so that we don't. But if they don't, we have to. They can't have it both ways.

The "phantom visit" fraud

Posted by Richard Sunday, September 25, 2011 Bailiff

This is the other half of the Council Tax scam, which Booker now reports in his column (above - click to expand). I can now reveal that it was he who approached West Yorkshire Police (WYP) and got from them the formal statement that the so-called "phantom visits" were fraud, contrary to Section 2 of the Fraud Act 2006.

Despite this welcome development, however, the message has not got to the plod at street level. Their line – we now discover - is that, because no money changed hands, my particular case is a "civil matter". The logic of this is, to say the very least, bizarre. By their reckoning, an attempt to defraud is none of their business – I have to give the fraudsters some money before they will treat it as a crime.

This stance seems even more bizarre when one is aware that S.2 states that a person is in breach of this section "if he dishonestly makes a false representation, and intends, by making the representation to make a gain for himself or another, or to cause loss to another or to expose another to a risk of loss". There is nothing there at all about money changing hands.

Faced with this WYP stupidity, however, I had already written to the Chief Constable, when I received a call from his office telling me that the sergeant from the neighbourhood police team would be calling on me.

Needless to say, that visit did not transpire. Instead, I got a visit from two uniformed plodettes, who did not have the first idea of what they were calling for, but merely had been sent by their sergeant to find out what I wanted. They listened, without taking any notes, much less a statement or looking at any of the documentation, and departed. Since then, I have heard nothing, and wearily, another letter has gone off to the Chief Constable's office.

My impression now is that the press office is trying to row back, but with this week's Booker column, the cat is now out of the bag. And maybe now, the local paper – which has so far been sitting on the fence – may stir itself and do a story. It would be too much of a miracle, however, for the plod to act.