THE council is under fire from one of Wiltshire’s biggest unions over £2m in uncollected council tax.

Andy Newman, head of the GMB in Swindon and Wiltshire, said that budget cuts approved on Thursday night needn’t have been as deep - if only it collected all the money it was owed.

A total of £1.96m went uncollected last year.

But the council has been quick to hit back, saying the figure is “misleading”.

Mr Newman, 49 and from Belgrave Street, New Town, said: “The scale of the cuts are much too big, even if that £1.9m was available. But if everyone who should pay council tax paid it, we would have less cuts.

“The council can send people to prison, attack earnings, send in the bailiffs – they’ve got the power.

“To have so much money uncollected does raise questions why they haven’t looked to collect that money first before making cuts to front line services.

“In my view they should be tough on collecting this in order to avoid cuts in services and loss of jobs.”

The £1.9m in uncollected tax is for the year ending April 2010 – the latest available full-year figure.

The GMB, which represents 3,500 staff in Wiltshire from factory workers to binmen, revealed the data in the summer.

But as the Swindon public brace for cuts stemming from last week’s council budget, the union has redoubled its pressure to have “zero tolerance” on tax avoiders.

Mr Newman, a Labour party member, said the council should “borrow against” the uncollected cash on the expectation that the money will be clawed back eventually. He said: “They could use money sitting in their reserves while they’re waiting for this money to come through.”

But in a statement the council said only around two per cent of council tax went uncollected last year, making it one of the best performing in the UK.

“The official figures about how much council tax we recover are always misleading, because they take the position at the end of the financial year, 31 March,” the statement read.

“It’s not realistic to expect any council to collect everything they are owed, because some people simply disappear and can’t be traced, and there are those who are in financial difficulties and can’t pay.

“Others refuse to pay even though they can, and we have a variety of measures we can use to recover money from them, including legal action to allow us to collect any money owed directly from their wages, or by instructing bailiffs to recover it, but this can take time.

“Borrowing money on the basis that all the money we are owed will eventually be repaid therefore isn’t realistic.

“If the economy does not recover as quickly as everyone hopes, we would be in a worse position because the number of people who genuinely can’t pay is always higher in a recession.”

£1.95m also went uncollected in business rates.

Although the council has a responsibility to collect these, all the money it gathers goes back to central government and is then apportioned out across the country.