Councils are nothing more than bureaucratic empire builders that are only interested in forwarding their own agenda and their mates. They are the most useless and corrupt part of our tiers of government.
Best advice I have is do everything you can within the law to avoid interacting with them, and for things like the number of people living in the house well what they don't know won't hurt them and unless you really p*ss off the neighbours or goto the extremes of having 37 people in the house they will never know.
