People across Norwich still owe more than �1m in unpaid council tax from the previous financial year.

And across the county of Norfolk that outstanding bill rises to almost �3m.

The debt, if paid, could dramatically reduce the scale of local authority budget cuts planned across the county.

Norfolk County Council alone is being forced to slash �155m from its services over the next four years, leading to around 1,000 redundancies.

The largest amount owed to any authority in tax across the whole county was to Norwich City Council for the 2009-2010 year, totalling more than �1,029,758.

Great Yarmouth Borough Council was still owed a total of �525,818, with North Norfolk District Council and the Borough Council of King's Lynn and West Norfolk both owed over �400,000.

South Norfolk District Council was still trying to recover �309,000 and Broadland District Council failed to bring in �192,000 of charges.

The total figure outstanding from all Norfolk councils last year is �2,933,906, although this represents a small fraction of the expected council tax income for the same period.

The Borough Council of King's Lynn and West Norfolk's outstanding figure of more than �450,000 represents just 0.7pc of their calculated income for that year.

The Norfolk total is part of the �530m shown to be owed to councils across the whole of the UK from the 2009-2010 financial year by Freedom of Information requests filed by the BBC.

According to the figures, councils across Norfolk also had historic council tax shortfalls from 1993 to 2010 of �10.9m.

A spokesman for Norwich City Council said: 'Every year the city council works hard to reduce the amount of uncollected council tax money it is owed and recover as much of it as possible.'

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