To help with the looming cost of living crisis the then-Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak announced in February that council taxpayers would all get a £150 rebate to ease financial difficulties.

A new report to Swindon Borough Councils’ adult’s health, care and housing overview and scrutiny committee details the incredibly complex steps staff at Euclid Street had to take in order to make such an apparently simple announcement actually happen.

After the announcement Whitehall’s Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities told Swindon it would receive from central funds £12,482,400 enough for 83,216 mandatory payments and an additional £371,400 for 2,476 discretionary payments.

It also told the council that if it spend more than that on mandatory payments that would be covered, but if it spent less, Swindon would have to return the outstanding cash.

The rules were that the payments were only to be made to council taxpayers at their main residence on April 1 2022. No pay6ment was to be made to absent landlords or those owning empty properties.

Councils were instructed to pay the rebates into the bank accounts of those who pay by direct debit first. And also to receive the first payment of this year’s council tax in order to prevent fraud.

Here are the steps the council had to take.

First, it had to make sure that empty properties were excluded from the list of council taxpayers.

Then two lists were made of taxpayers, those who paid by direct debit and those who paid by another method.

The report says: “These had to be checked and those with correspondence addresses who were thought to be landlords removed. There were over 53,000 payments to be made by Bacs and approximately 28,700 non-direct debit payers.”

Council staff came up with a system where the council could pay residents and trialled that with 20 cases successfully.

They tried with 5,000 payments but that was too large for the council’s system to handle. Instead payments were made in batches of 1,500, with most being made by May 11.

Some payments were rejected by the taxpayers’ bank and had to be investigated and made, and another two payment runs were made in late May and June to catch those who hadn’t paid their first instalment by early May.

Then officers had to try and pay those who didn’t use direct debit and whose bank accounts weren’t known to the council.

The report says: “A number of organisations were offering to make payment by vouchers that could be redeemed at local Post offices and since the Council no longer issue cheques this seemed the best solution.”

The Post Office was selected as the council’s supplier: “A letter to be issued with the Vouchers was produced and staff were given access to Post Office portal to upload files for vouchers to be issued and also to receive information on vouchers redeemed.”

There were 29,700 vouchers issued from late May until early July and by the end of August nearly 25,000 had been cashed in,

If any vouchers for mandatory payments are not redeemed, £150 will be deducted from council tax accounts when they expire after three months, starting this month.

There was also a discretionary scheme set up for those who didn’t qualify for mandatory repayments but who may suffer hardship. 351 payments have been made under this scheme.

By the end of September, the report says 78,246 payments will have been made and 4,800 deductions made to accounts to ensure those not paid don’t miss out.

The report concludes: “There have been complications with the issuing of payments, but comparative statistics issued by DLUHC showed that Swindon had processed payments as quick, if not quicker than many councils.

"As at the end of July 2022 the national average was that 86 per cent of households had received their payment in Swindon this was 93 per cent."

An initial payment of £116,602 was made by the DLUHC to the borough council to cover its costs in administering the payment.