No one should go to prison for not being able to pay a tax.
Especially one which is so deeply unfair and corrupt in the way it is set up.
The entire debt industry in this country is sleasy and Dickensian. If I was Prime Minister tomorrow one of my first acts would be to ban the buying and selling of debts.
My second one would be to make parents pay for the resources which their children use.
It's not a tax at all. All government departments have a choice how they collect a debt or force their authority so why not a local authority.
They can choose to go the Magistrates way or the County Court.
In either court all they ask is that a Magistrate or District Judge make an order for the repayment of the debt/or require attendance on a government officer at a given time and place..
It's when that order is not complied with that things change. Fail to ignore or refuse to comply will result in consequences.
You will be sent to prison for contempt of that Magistrate's Order and still have to pay the debt. The Magistrate could also order a removal of goods etc or take the money from their bank account.
The same goes for a County Court order, but a committal warrant is very rarely used.
The reason they go to a Magistrate as they are more likely to send you to prison than a County Court judge would - big stick and all that.
In my career with the government many was the time that I had a Committal Warrant issued by the High Court simply because the individual concerned decided that he/she didn't feel like coming to see me at my office. A van load of tooled up police officers, forced entry if need be and the individual after leaving his/her home was seeing the inside of the nearest prison for an indefinite time until they decided to co-operate with me. All good fun especially around the Christmas/New Year period when I would be on leave for the three weeks holiday period. A colleague had the chairman of a well known football club removed to Walton Prison in Liverpool for the same thing.