Housing Benefit - effective reductions

I've received my latest assessment for Housing Benefit. I gave the Council notice in July when I received notice from my landlord of the annual increase - which this year was well above inflation. The increase started in Oct. The Council sent me the assessment on 3 Dec. Are they overworked?

The upshot is that for the third year in a row my rent has increased at more than inflation and my benefit award has stayed the same. This amounts to an effective 10% reduction in Housing Benefit. And that extra comes out of ESA (Income Support as was).

If Housing Benefit does keep pace with rents then the poor will be getting poorer. I'm not too badly off being single, frugal and living in shared accommodation, but for some people this effective reduction in the amount of money they get will be hurting.

The Council Pay My Rent II

Just received two - two! - BENEFIT DECISION NOTICES, dated one day apart, in the post after having submitted a new letter from my landlord. Got the review I asked for and the result is I'm back to the council paying my whole rent with the amount for bills included. This leaves me with a dilemma. My understanding is that utility bills etc should not be included in calculating my benefit (which is fair enough I suppose). The whole point of my recent decrease in benefit was that they'd been over paying me.

So what to do? I don't have direct contact with the person making the calculation and neither does anyone that I talk to at the council - theoretically the rules are iron clad and just applied by the anonymous drone who makes the calculation. I have very little say in their decisions as I found out a month ago. Then it meant losing £15 a week, this month it means getting that back. I rang up the council to clarify what I'm getting now - it took 30 mins on hold (only the unemployed could possibly have the time to be able to get through to them). I wonder if it was something to do with being on both Income Support and Disability Living Allowance - I think that entitles me to a higher level of support.

A recent appeal court ruling says that Councils cannot reclaim any over-payments that result from a council mistake. See the Daily Mail report: Taxpayer foots £1bn benefits blunder bill as claimants told they don't have to return overpayments (they are not the most sympathetic paper to our plight, but came up first on Google).

My inclination is to keep my head down. I can't say I understand how they operate and every time I have any contact with them I both learn something new and find I was misinformed the last time I contacted them. It's incredibly stressful getting mucked about like this. I have resigned myself to being poorer, and I'm loath to kick off the whole process again if I don't have to.

It's not entirely ethical I suppose, but on balance I think I'm not going to ask them to consider paying me less. It's not a huge amount, and I do not live an extravagant life. It means I can put a little aside for those new winter boots I'll be needing before long.

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.