The Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) has published a new report called ‘Vital Signs’ which looks at measuring vulnerability in council tax collection.
The report is the fourth piece in a series of work designed to drive up standards in government debt collection. In 2020, the CSJ released ‘Collecting Dust’, which charted a new path to improve government debt collection. This was followed by ‘Taking Control for Good’, the result of the CSJ’s partnership with enforcement agencies and debt advisers to design and launch a new voluntary oversight body – the Enforcement Conduct Board. The CSJ released ‘Still Collecting Dust’ in August 2024, slightly ahead of the Ministry of Justice’s planned review into the need for the ECB to be put on statutory footing for two years after its launch.
In June 2025, the Ministry of Justice launched a new consultation about creating a new statutory regulator for enforcement. In ‘Vital Signs’, CSJ turns to another aspect of standards in government debt collection taken on by the Enforcement Conduct Board, namely the identification and support of vulnerable consumers whose personal circumstances add a further layer of complexity to the collections process.
While vulnerability is considered in enforcement, the CSJ says that it is only recently that the concept has begun to be built out in the enforcement context by the ECB and there is little published data on it. This new report seeks to further that process, exploring the nature and extent of vulnerability amongst UK adults who fall behind on their council tax using the Financial Conduct Authority’s Financial Lives Survey 2022 to measure the FCA’s headline vulnerability metric and its key drivers of vulnerability. Understanding the extent of vulnerability amongst the population of adults who fall behind on their council tax can provide government and firms greater insight into the complexity of the collection process and ensure the right support package is put in place to help consumers manage their debts and organise repayment.
It found that UK adults who fall behind on their council tax show heightened levels of vulnerability compared to the general public on every driver of vulnerability. On each driver, UK adults who fall behind on their council tax show at least double the rate of vulnerability. 64% of the study population showed at least one sign of multiple drivers of vulnerability and 14% showed at least one characteristic across all four drivers of vulnerability.
A large proportion of vulnerable consumers showed multiple characteristics of the driver they exhibited. For example, while 20% of UK adults who have fallen behind on their council tax showed at least one characteristic of the poor health vulnerability driver, 66% of the vulnerable group showed multiple characteristics.
It is hoped that this paper may help stakeholders consider the vulnerability of the households who fall behind on their council tax and may therefore be passed to collection.