The Journey of I, Dream, the man...

Reminds me that during the last recession (early 1980s) I was out of work for over a year, before I finally took up teaching. I had fortuitously taken on mortgage insurance that covered me most of that time.

Being out of work I was able to claim a rates reduction, quite substantial. But because interest rates were coming down (sometimes more than once a month) that meant there was a balance between the mortgage insurance payment and the actual mortgage. My local authority (at that time Preston) wrote to me every interest rate reduction and asked me to declare the difference between actual interest and the amount of my insurance payment, and took the full amount off me, even though it was mere shillings each time.

Indeed there was an incident at the time reported in the paper that an elderly lady had been, through their error, a penny short in her rates, and they took her to court to recover the penny.

For the petty sums involved the amount of expenditure in administering these communications and reassessments vastly outweighed the gains for the council. But that's why councils are always strapped for cash - the wastage is astronomical - most of or rates are spent funding fiscal incompetence on an interplanetary scale.

Reminds me that during the last recession (early 1980s) I was out of work for over a year, before I finally took up teaching. I had fortuitously taken on mortgage insurance that covered me most of that time.

Being out of work I was able to claim a rates reduction, quite substantial. But because interest rates were coming down (sometimes more than once a month) that meant there was a balance between the mortgage insurance payment and the actual mortgage. My local authority (at that time Preston) wrote to me every interest rate reduction and asked me to declare the difference between actual interest and the amount of my insurance payment, and took the full amount off me, even though it was mere shillings each time.

Indeed there was an incident at the time reported in the paper that an elderly lady had been, through their error, a penny short in her rates, and they took her to court to recover the penny.

For the petty sums involved the amount of expenditure in administering these communications and reassessments vastly outweighed the gains for the council. But that's why councils are always strapped for cash - the wastage is astronomical - most of or rates are spent funding fiscal incompetence on an interplanetary scale.