DELAYS

Problem:

What can we do about delays in payment of housing benefit?

Solution:

Delays in processing of housing benefit claims and changes in circumstances are the biggest problem facing most landlords.

The most serious problem is that delays mean that there is no way of knowing when something has gone wrong with a claim. You can find yourself waiting for a claim to be processed only to find out that the claim form has gone missing or the claim has lapsed because the claimant has not provided information that has been requested. Huge sums can be lost in this way. You cannot do anything effective about this problem until you have solved the problem of delays since you cannot tell if non payment is routine delay or some other problem until it is too late do anything about it.

In short stay housing projects delays can mean that information is not requested until after a claimant has left.

Many overpayments are the result of failure to deal with changes in a claimant's situation on time.

Huge amounts of staff time are spent chasing payment. Staff often describe this work as some of the most stressful that they do.

If delays were abolished or significantly reduced it would often be possible to go back to the old system whereby claimants were responsible for their own benefit claims. As it is, voluntary sector landlords are forced to request rent direct in order to ensure that money finally arrives and claimants are not tempted by huge arrears payments.

The impact of the problem is difficult to underestimate. In a report published by the Rowntree Foundation "How housing benefit can work for community care" author Steve Griffiths reports housing benefit officers as saying that the best thing they could do for community care was to pay the right benefit on time. This view was shared by a large number of supported housing providers. Conversely delays were found to lead to anxiety and stress and more enquires to housing benefit offices, leading to more delays.

Even if you feel that you can live with the current level of delays you should consider taking action in order to stop things getting worse. Initatives such as the verification framework and similar anti-fraud initatives are likely to make matters worse. In a 1997 National Audit Office Report- "Measures to Combat Housing Benefit Fraud" it was suggested that too much stress was being put on processing claims quickly. The speed of processing should be slowed down in order to check accuracy and prevent fraud! By raising the issue of delays now you can help to head off this kind of approach.

Taking Action

Where benefit is to be paid to the claimant it is really up to them to chase the housing benefit office, but where it is to be paid to you it is really your job, since the tenant will not know whether the money has been paid or not.

You probably already have a model which will help you deal with this problem.- your rent arrears policy. A good rent arrears policy has a number of stages that are gone through as a matter of routine. Arrears of a certain number of weeks trigger a particular action. If there is no satisfactory result after a further number of weeks the next action is resorted to, and so on. Staff are given standard procedure guides and standard letters and forms may be drawn up. Similar procedures are used in most organisations to deal with other debts.

When you are chasing money it is crucial that you consistently chase debts and always carry out any threats that you make. Otherwise the debtor may see no reason to pay up.

Delays in payment of housing benefit should be dealt with in the same way. Where it is clear that the delay is the fault of the housing benefit office and not the tenant then it is the height of bad practice to pursue the tenant, for example by issuing a notice to quit.

Section 10 tells you what the housing benefit office must legally do and when they must make payment.

Stage 1

Decide how long after the claim you want to start this stage which involves sending a letter asking for either full payment or an interim payment.

The earliest that you can send the letter in direct payment cases is 4 weeks after the claim has gone in, but this may be a bit early. For example, if the majority of claims are paid within 5 weeks and you are happy with this, you might decide to send the letter 6 weeks after the claim if no payment has been made. The important thing is that, once you have set a time limit, you stick to it. It is better to set a limit of 8 weeks and do it consistently than to set a limit of 4 weeks and not send the letter all the time.

You will probably want to provide staff with a standard letter to send. This could point out that payment had not been made, ask the housing benefit office to contact you immediately if they require further information and say that further action will be taken if payment is not made within a set period.

Stage 2

If stage 1 does not bring results you have a number of possible things that can be done. You can:

• Apply for judicial review; (Link to judicial review)
• Sue the housing benefit office;(link to suing the HB office
• Complain to the Ombudsman.

You need to decide how long after sending in the letter in stage one you want to start this stage. Again, it is important to set time limits which you always keep to. Starting any one of these procedures will almost always get a payment in the case you are dealing with.

Judicial review is expensive and is best left for the most serious problems, or where the housing benefit office has said it will refuse to process a claim for some reason. Suing the housing benefit office is comparatively cheap. The small claims procedure could be tackled by most housing workers after a bit of advice. Complaining to the Ombudsman is free and often results in compensation being paid. However the procedure itself is very slow. It is important to complain about every delay and to send a copy of your complaint to the housing benefit office. Section 12 gives an example of an Ombudsman complaint in Birmingham which was a very effective way of dealing with delays.

Although commencing any of these actions usually results in the claim being processed and any payment due being made, it does not, in itself improve procedures. This is why it is important to take action in every case. This is initially time consuming, but the aim is to get the housing benefit office to understand that, unless they change their practice and process the claims in a reasonable time, action will always be taken. The procedure need no be no more complicated to deal with than many others you already operate. If you complain to the Ombudsman, the Ombudsman's report may suggest amendments in housing benefit office procedures.

If all this seems a bit intimidating have a look at your worst cases first. You could decide to send your initial letter after 6 weeks of no action, warning of an ombudsman complaint if no action was taken after a further 6 weeks. This would limit your serious action (in this case an Ombudsman complaint) to cases outstanding for 12 weeks. You could do this for a while and then evaluate how things are going. If it is working you could shorten the total period to 10 weeks and then gradually reduce the period until delays are at an acceptable level.

If you are able to solve problems with delays you will find that many of your other problems with housing benefit will disappear. Problems with overpayments, errors in the amount of payment or payments made to the wrong person can all be picked up quickly and dealt with if benefit is paid on time.

An ombudsman complaint has to say what maladministration has occurred and why you or the claimant has suffered injustice as a result of this maladministration. I suggest a draft letter along the following lines:

This page last updated: 5/7/2000 12:16