Allerdale Borough Council has an Internet payment service for customers. The system accepts payments for a variety of services including Council Tax, Business Rates, Excess Charges and Trade Refuse Invoices. In addition, rent payments on behalf of Derwent & Solway Housing Association can also be made via the new system.

All our offices across the authority have been accepting credit and debit cards since April 2002, for all payments due to Allerdale. This service is, of course, still available during office hours. We accept the following cards, Visa, MasterCard, Switch and Solo.

If you experience problems with using our Internet payments service this might be because your browser is not updated with the latest certificate authority information (users of Internet Explorer version 5 and above should not have a problem with this).

To solve this issue users can either upgrade their browsers to more current versions; such upgrades are available free of charge from http://www.microsoft.com/ and http://www.netscape.com/. There is also a utility from VeriSign that installs a new root certificate into their existing browser, without need for a full browser upgrade. This utility is available from: https://digitalid.trustwise.com/globalServer/repository/globalRoot.htm.

While viewing our secure payment pages a padlock appears on the bottom right of your browser window. If you double-click this you can see details of the secure certificate being used for your transaction. Users of Internet Explorer version 5.x may see the message 'This certificate has failed to verify for all of its intended purposes'. Users can ignore this message, the transaction is still secure; indeed, clicking the Certificate Path tab in the dialog box displays the message 'This certificate is OK'. For more information on this please go to the Microsoft Knowledge Base Article - 233479.

Allerdale Borough Council has also introduced a new 24-hour, 7-day a week Automated Telephone Payment service for customers. The system will accept payments for a variety of services including Council Tax, Business Rates, Excess Charges and Trade Refuse Invoices. In addition, rent payments on behalf of Derwent & Solway Housing Association can also be made via the new system.

People can connect to the service by phoning:

01900 702666

on any touch-tone phone and the voice of one of our cashiers will take them through the steps of how to pay. Just have your credit or debit card ready, along with the reference number of your intended payment.