LIVERPOOL council has been criticised for using bailiffs to collect council tax.

The Local Government Ombudsman said the authority had used bailiffs “inappropriately” in two cases.

A report stated: “[This is] a growing phenomenon nationally on which the Ombudsmen intend to issue a special report in near future.”

The ruling on bailiffs was just one of the findings in Ombudsman Anne Seex’s annual report into local authorities.

Merseyside councils paid out a collective £27,451 in the past year to settle complaints about administrative mistakes.

The Ombudsman got involved in 214 complaints against the six Liverpool city region councils in the year that ended in March, 2009, compared to 420 the year before.

Due to a change in the way figures are compiled, it is not possible to make direct comparisons on the number of complaints received in previous years.

But the figures appear to show that the total number of complaints is falling.

The Ombudsman had 218 enquiries about Wirral Council, of which 158 were forwarded for investigation. The figure was inflated by the number of complaints about the council’s proposed library closures.

Wirral was censured after a child spent more than a year “deprived” of full-time education due to its maladministration.

The authority failed to comply with a decision of a Special Educational Needs and Disability Tribunal that a child should attend a mainstream school.

As a result of a row between the council and the child’s parents about where the family’s main residence was, the child got no full-time education between October, 2005, and November, 2006.

The case was eventually resolved and £1,655 compensation was paid. Mrs Seex said she was “gravely concerned” about the way the council dealt with the case, and as a result has “aired” them with council chief executive Steve Maddox.

In Liverpool, the council paid out £1,500 after losing the files of a person who had spent 18 years in care. Officials are still searching for the documents.