The reality of council tax court fees in England
In 2024/25, councils in England raised £258million in court costs for the non-payment of council tax, sending more than three million households to court. These new findings are part of
Better Policy is a consultancy & campaign for fairer, evidence-based decision making in local government.
We work with councils, charities & organisations to design better policy.
In 2024/25, councils in England raised £258million in court costs for the non-payment of council tax, sending more than three million households to court. These new findings are part of
The problem with ten-year thinking This week, I was asked to speak at the Resolve Poverty conference on what better local anti-poverty policy could look like in ten years’ time,
The new Crisis and Resilience Fund guidance is the most coherent and humane framework for local welfare support England has seen for more than a decade. It promotes cash-first delivery,
I started Better Policy after more than 20 years working in and around local government, public services, and social policy.
During that time, I saw brilliant people trying to make good decisions inside systems that often made it unnecessarily difficult. Policies were developed under intense financial and political pressure. Evidence was gathered too late. Consultation became a procedural hurdle. Equality assessments documented decisions rather than improving them. Short-term fixes created new problems somewhere else.
Bad policy is rarely the work of bad people. More often, it emerges from fragmented systems, untested assumptions, institutional habits, and decisions made without enough time or challenge.
But the consequences are real. Policy determines who receives help, who pays more, who is believed, who is excluded, and how people experience the institutions that are supposed to support them.
Better Policy exists to help organisations make those decisions more deliberately. My mission is to combine evidence, professional experience, social science, and the voices of the people affected to create policy that is fairer, clearer, and more likely to work.
I help organisations work through complex policy questions, from defining the real problem to developing, testing, consulting on, and implementing a solution.
I speak about how policy is made, how bias and public narratives influence decisions, and why apparently technical systems can produce profoundly unequal outcomes.
My training helps officers, elected members, policy teams, and organisations become more confident and deliberate in the way they develop policy.
I evaluate policies, programmes, and services to understand what they are achieving, who they are reaching, and where they may be creating unintended effects.
I conduct independent research into the systems and decisions that shape people’s lives, with a focus on council tax, social security, local government finance, debt, poverty, and regional inequality.
I am a policy commentator, researcher, trainer, and experienced public speaker.
I have appeared on BBC News, BBC Radio 4’s Money Box, LBC, and BBC Wales, and regularly speak at national conferences, professional events, workshops, webinars, and policy discussions.
My specialist subjects include council tax and local government finance, social security, poverty, inequality, public-service reform, and the realities of how policy decisions are made.
Subscribe for thoughtful, plain-English analysis of the policies shaping public services and people’s lives.
I write about council tax, welfare, local government, inequality, public opinion, and the gap between how policy is supposed to work and what happens in practice.
Expect original research, honest commentary, new ideas, and the occasional explanation of something that really should make more sense than it does.