A senior county councillor has agreed to write off individual debts totalling more than £300,000.
Today (Tuesday 31 March), Councillor Nick Bennett, East Sussex County Council’s lead member for resources and climate change, agreed to write off 14 individual debts – each worth more than £10,000, which collectively totalled £308,272.83.
Councillor Bennett was told that, in each case, all debt recovery actions had been exhausted before the decision.
Specific details of each case are understood to have been set out in a confidential report which would have been available to Councillor Bennett.
The publicly available report said that council officials had established either that the individual or their estate in each case had insufficient funds to repay the debt.
According to this report, the council wrote off debts totalling £733,863.99 in 2025-26, the financial year that has just ended.
This figure included debts totalling £425,591.16 that, individually, amounted to less than £10,000 each so did not require Councillor Bennett’s authorisation to be written off.
The report said that the total figure was £175,000 more than the amount for 2024-25 which totalled £558,684.36.
Officials said that write-offs “remain low as a percentage of total income collected”.
