Housing Benefit (Abolition of the Family Premium and Date of Claim Amendment) Regulations 2015 — House of Lords, 2016-02-03
Topic: Housing
Colin MacKenzie Low (Crossbench, Unknown): My Lords, I support the Motion of the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood. I will speak particularly on the backdating aspect of the regulations Limiting backdating of housing benefit payments to one month is likely to put vulnerable people at risk of rent arrears and subsequent eviction, and possibly homelessness. Crisis, the charity for single homeless people, wrote to tell me that it is concerned that the most vulnerable will be affected by this change, including those who have experienced homelessness. It says that many of the people it supports to find and sustain tenancies make successful backdating claims for housing benefit often for upward of 12 weeks. These are often the result of clients having additional support needs that make it difficult for them to navigate the benefits system. Consequently, they fail to claim the benefits to which they are entitled in time The Government dispute the suggestion that limiting the backdating period will lead to tenants falling into rent arrears but Crisis says that many of its clients accrue considerable arrears before they seek the support they need to backdate a claim. Backdating claims are often made following a change in circumstances that affect a person’s entitlement or because of failures in the system that lead to housing benefit not being paid. I will mention three examples of when people may need to make a backdated claim. There is where there are fluctuations in income. When someone finds a job their entitlement to housing benefit must be adjusted. If they enter casual work, such as on a zero-hours contract, their entitlement must be calculated on a weekly basis. This can lead to payments being stopped until the claimant can provide all necessary payslips. That causes delay and the need for a backdated claim. The ability to backdate by only one month may not be enough to cover that delay Housing benefit claim forms may be lost. Despite the best intentions of council staff, housing benefit claim forms can go missing or online submissions may not be received. I can empathise with this and can vouch for the fact that this kind of thing can happen through nobody’s fault. Today, I rang up to buy some more premium bonds, only to be told that I needed to provide a password. Apparently, one had been sent to me in the course of the last year but it never arrived. Getting back to housing benefit, resubmitting claim forms can cause serious delays at the beginning of a tenancy. We need a backdating period sufficient to cover such delays Again, housing benefit is sometimes stopped in error when someone is sanctioned. This can lead to arrears, particularly if the landlord is receiving direct payments and does not notify the tenant that the rent has not been paid The Social Security Advisory Committee advised that the case for this policy has not been made out and recommended that it should be possible to backdate housing benefit for at least three months. It says that inconsistencies between the rules attaching to different benefits are hard to defend and add to the complexity that claimants are required to navigate. For people whose rent is paid monthly or four-weekly in arrears, the proposal will mean that there is no slack in the current complex legacy benefit context for them to realise that there is a problem with their housing benefit entitlement and make a late claim. This presents a clear risk that the impact on landlord and tenant behaviour could result in upward pressure on homelessness among the more vulnerable, with attendant costs that could offset the projected savings. It is disappointing, the committee says, that there has been no cost-benefit analysis of these aspects. For people whose rent is paid monthly or four-weekly in arrears, the proposal will mean that the new rules will not provide sufficient time for a backdated claim to cover the delays that have taken place The fact that there has been no effective impact assessment makes it difficult to assess the effect of reducing backdating by different amounts from the current six months. Centrepoint undertook a survey of more than 800 young people using its services and found that 78% of those who made a late claim for housing benefit were not seeking backdating for longer than three months; the majority of backdating claims could therefore be accommodated within a three-month period, and reducing it further could have a financial impact on a sizeable group of vulnerable young people, potentially causing hardship to those least able to withstand it. The Committee highlighted the fact that the legacy benefits system is more complex than universal credit; that being the case, there is a strong case for maintaining a longer backdating period to account for these complexities. Removing the ability to back-date housing benefit claims for a sufficient period may deter landlords from letting to tenants in receipt of housing benefit. Landlords may be particularly reluctant to let to people who have experienced homelessness in the past, given that they may be vulnerable to falling into rent arrears, often through no fault of their own The committee concluded that the position faced by housing benefit legacy claimants, particularly the more vulnerable, is substantially different and more challenging than the position following migration on to universal credit. It added that in the absence of a robust impact assessment, the case for a simple alignment with a one-month backdating rule has not been made and that there is a significant risk of offsetting additional costs to the estimated one-year saving of £10 million if the proposal is pursued in this form. It therefore recommends that, if the Government still wish to make an early reduction in the backdating period, a three-month period would strike a better balance between the aim of securing an expenditure saving and recognition of the substantial differences between the housing benefit legacy and universal credit positions. With the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, I would want to maintain that the three-month compromise is the one that we should go for, and the Government should rethink.