The Council Pay My Rent

The Council pay my rent – else I’d be living on the street I suppose. But recently they thought up a new way to cut their benefit budget. Rightly, they assess what a reasonable amount of rent is in this fair city, and limit what they pay out so that no one is treated to a better class of accommodation than a bludger should be able to afford. Though I have lived in the same house for seven years and become accustomed to it.

Recently in a daring of sleight of accounting they redefined the assessment area to include vast tracks of farm land and small villages up to an hour’s train ride away. The median rent across this area is, surprise, quite a lot lower than the city itself, so if you pay rent in the city and claim for housing benefit your are 100% unlikely to be fully covered.

So when I informed them – as the large red lettering on their written communications with me tell me I must – that my modest rent had gone up by a modest £3 or 4% I got a letter saying that my benefit was going down by £12!

'You have the right to appeal' said the lovely Ms G when I called the council to ask 'what the fuck is going on?” but she made it clear that there is no leeway they have to pay you what it says on the scale. And then explained the new system. I called my MP, who, worst luck is a Liberal Democrat – although I gather he doesn’t claim for commuting to London and therefore still has a modicum of credibility. I wrote to my City Councillor, I wrote to the newspapers... I did not sleep.

As it happens I was given the wrong information. The Council have been over-paying me for a year. At hearing this I wept uncontrollably on the desk of my advisor at the Council. But we're not going to ask for it back, she said. (I didn't know until a day or two later about a recent court ruling which says that they cannot ask for money back if the overpayment was their incompetence). So I'm still down about £15 a week. Ouch.

None of this was helped by the poorly set out and ambiguously worded letter from my landlord - actually from the property department of the trust which administers the place. It took quite a lot of jumping up and down to get them to understand that a table of figures would make my life a lot easier than hiding them away in a novella.

The good news is that hidden away in the jumble and garble were some claimables that the council, as there was an ambiguity, had simply ignored when calculating my entitlement. So I may well be better off than I feared. Taking the new information in today - but of course a decision takes 4 - 6 weeks!

I've been really stressed this past couple of months - not sleeping much. Hopefully this will put the matter to rest for another year. Now all I have to worry about is the fact that I submitted my IB50 in June and haven't heard back from the Govt.