Rotherham Council has no ‘reliable indicator’ to say how many people cashed in the £150 tax rebate at pawnbrokers

At a meeting of Rotherham Council on Wednesday (July 19), Cllr Michael Bennett-Sylvester (Independent) wanted to know whether the council knew how many people had visited a pawnbroker to cash in their £150 council tax rebate.

Last year, it was widely reported people without banking access were forced to queue in the town centre to receive the government’s cost of living support – however, due to the pawnbrokers’ policy, they were charged and therefore unable to receive the whole amount.

Cllr Michael Bennett-Sylvester (Independent) asked: “Do we have any indication of the amount of cheques cashed by pawnbroking services following last year’s £150 council tax which saw so many shocking queues outside of town centre pawnbrokers?”

Cllr Chris Read, the leader of the council, said the advice he was given was “there is no way of checking where those cheques have been cashed”.

He added: “I’m afraid we don’t have a reliable indicator of how many people were in the circumstances you described.”

In a supplementary question, Cllr Bennett-Sylvester said he was sure members could all agree it was “a quite substantial number”.

He added when the scheme went through the scrutiny process not one of the 59 councillors could envisage seeing queues of people trying to cash in on them.

Cllr Bennett-Sylvester also wanted to know what lessons were learned “from this awful experience” to make sure anyone without access to banking can get their money quickly and in full.

Cllr Read said the number one lesson is to articulate that those cheques could be cashed at the full value at council offices.

However, he added, when the government had published its statistics some months later, “we’d actually supply the cheques to residents faster than any other local authority in the country.”