Nicholas Dobson relates an unusual attempt to avoid council tax liability
- A claimant sought judicial review of her liability to pay council tax, following magistrate court liability orders and county court charging orders. Permission was refused since the claimant had an appropriate statutory alternative remedy to judicial review which she did not use.
‘Things,’ sang Little Buttercup in Gilbert and Sullivan’s 1878 comic opera HMS Pinafore, ‘are seldom what they seem.’ Lewis Carroll’s Mad Gardener would agree. For it was he who thought he saw an elephant that practised on a fife but looked again and found it was a letter from his wife. So, when navigating legal complexities, it can be easy to get caught up in ‘heaps of entangled weeds’ (per George Crabbe), where what at first seems one thing may turn out as quite another. For sometimes there can be delusive dimensions governing what initially looked quite straightforward.
One case in point may be the council tax liability decision in R (Kofa) v Oldham Metropolitan Bolton Council [2024] EWHC 685 (Admin), judgment in
