Crackdown on council tax cheats

District councils throughout the county are joining forces to weed out anyone who is claiming single person discounts on their council tax when they do not live alone.

The purge on benefits cheats will see council tax information from local authorities married up with other databases to identify cases where more than one adult is living at an address and yet a single occupancy discount is being claimed.

In the Harrogate district alone, there are 70,000 properties with 21,000 households receiving a single person occupancy discount.

Harrogate Borough Council's cabinet member for resources, Coun Alan Skidmore, stressed that most council tax discounts are claimed honestly and legitimately.

But he added: "There are those who think they can buck the system and claim discounts to which they know they are not entitled."

The new method of checking for possible ineligible claims using electronically-held databases is aimed at saving taxpayers' cash at a time when local authorities are battling to curb costs amid the Government's public sector cuts.