THE amount of unpaid council tax at a cash-strapped Teesside council has increased five-fold in six years, new figures reveal.

Middlesbrough Council was owed well over £11 million by its own residents at the end of the last financial year and that figure stood at £17.7 million at the end of January this year, although that figure is expected to reduce.

Independent councillor Joan McTigue got hold of the figures and said the increase in unpaid money - which was well under £500,000 ten years ago - was "alarming."

At the end of the last financial year, 2014/15 there was still £2,890,000 uncollected council tax just from that year. That amounted to 5.8 per cent of all council tax and was nearly £1 million more than the previous year (four per cent uncollected); and £2 million more than the year before that (1.5 per cent uncollected).

In the early to mid 1990s the amount of uncollected council tax was tiny, hovering around the £2,000 mark.

Councillor Nicky Walker, the council's executive member for finance, blamed the Government for abolishing Council Tax Benefit in 2013. Under that scheme many of the poorest households did not pay any council tax at all and local authorities were reimbursed with full costs.

When the point about the end of Council Tax Benefit was put to Cllr McTigue she suggested some low income families wasted money. She said: "I suggest you watch the popular TV programme On Benefits and Proud as I do. It followed two to three families who spent more on alcohol, bingo, cigarettes etc than they did on food."

However Cllr Walker, Labour, said the Conservative Government policy was "unfair."

She said: “This is not an issue of councils’ ability to collect but an issue of people’s ability to pay. In 2013, the Conservative Government replaced the Council Tax Benefit with the Council Tax Support Scheme which meant that thousands of people in Middlesbrough, on the lowest incomes and least able to pay, were required to pay Council Tax for the first time...Prior to this, in 2012/13 we collected more than 98 per cent of all council tax.

“The fact that this is an unfair policy which hits disproportionately those who have the least ability to pay is borne out by collection rate tables in which places with very low levels of deprivation such as Wokingham in the South East have high collection rates whereas places with high levels of deprivation such as Middlesbrough have lower collection rates."