HOUSING
Council taxpayers are losing millions of pounds as housing charities exploit loopholes that leave local authorities short-changed. Bristol housing leaderCllr Anthony Negus explains.
B
ristol City Council has written to the Department for Work and Pensions
asking them to review an ‘anomaly’, which it says is encouraging not-for-profit or- ganisations and charities to claim hun- dreds of pounds a week for accommoda- tion that would cost far less in the private sector. The council pays the cost, but is not reimbursed by the Government – costing local taxpayers in Bristol alone up to £3m a year, it claims.
The city’s housing and regeneration lead- er, Councillor Anthony Negus, said the situation was “unacceptable” and wanted the Government to look into the matter urgently.
He told PSE: “The problem is burgeoning. It has been going on for some time. When we first identified it, I think we were look- ing down the barrel of about £600,000 a year, and then quite quickly that went up to £1.5m. We think this year it will be £3m. We don’t know where it’s going to go from there.
“That is, frankly, money we do not have.
“A lot of local authorities are experiencing this problem and in fact the Department for Work and Pensions are reviewing this and five authorities, not including Bristol, are on the national working party.
“Clearly there is an appreciation that there is a wrinkle in the way the law is set out here. We’ve got to examine it, but in the meantime, let’s be honest, these working parties take a while to get through things, but this is taking money away from tax- payers right now. At the best of times, this would be a huge amount of money, but right now it’s absolutely critical.”
The loophole centres around the defini- tion of ‘exempt accommodation’, where the Government does not have to repay the full cost of local housing allowance to refund the council.
Negus explained: “Exempt accommoda- tion is where it’s provided by housing as- sociations, registered or unregistered; a registered charity; non-profit making vol- untary organisations and registered social landlords. It could be any of those bodies
checks and picking something to look into and really going to town on it, but we can- not cover all of this. What’s worrying us now is that while we actually concentrate on one organisation, three or four pop up behind them.
“This is a very serious problem for us,” the councillor advised, “and potentially a very much greater problem if it isn’t sorted out.”
The wider picture for social housing over- all in Bristol is mixed, Cllr Negus said.
where ‘that body or person so acting on its behalf provides the claimant with care, support or supervision’.
“Where there are people not having these so-called ‘additional services’, the Government pays in full, and we simply say we’ve got so many cases like this and the Government pays out.
“Where it’s exempt accommodation, we have two major problems: the first is they only pay 60% of the cost that is claimed, and whereas a housing benefit claim may be, say £60-70, in this case the equivalent figure is something like £250-300, and they will only pay 60% of that.
“Secondly, to even get that 60% back and certainly in order to be able to justify pay- ing the rest back – theoretically it’s avail- able - we have to spend a fantastic amount of officer time trawling through a massive amount of paperwork to present a case for each and every one of these.”
Are all of these claims ‘legitimate’?
Negus said he could not say for sure and would not accuse any organisations of act- ing illegitimately, but did say: “Our anten- nae are up – we feel that if these were all legitimate, I don’t think we’d be making remarks as strong as we are. It’s a loop- hole. This year another seven organisa- tions are challenging that they have got to be included within this register. It takes a huge amount of extra work to go up from £60 to £300 a week and we don’t have the resources to actually check in sufficient detail.
“We do investigate and we are having spot
He told PSE: “It’s a really tough time, particularly for a local authority. There is some scope out there, with Affordable Rent and all the rest, to get going on this but our wings have been severely clipped.
“We are examining what we can do, as we are certainly the largest holder of so- cial housing in the South West with over 18,000 homes, and obviously a huge wait- ing list.
“We are looking into schemes like com- munity land trusts; we’ve identified some sites and have been trying to rally people to get involved in that one. We’re also looking at some quite clever ways of work- ing with organisations to try to create new homes – we’re doing a lot of work behind the scenes on that too.
“There’s been a lot of investment and clev- er use of money to try to get to the Decent Home Standard. Now 97% of homes in Bristol are Decent Homes and we’re putting a lot more money into insulation next year to keep that going when we have a budget. We’re fighting to hang onto it; fuel poverty is a massive problem for peo- ple in Bristol.
“We’ve managed to work quite cleverly to acquire money from elsewhere to keep that going until we kick into the 2012 Green Deal money.”
Visit
www.bristol.gov.uk/housing Anthony Negus
FOR MORE INFORMATION public sector executive Mar/Apr 11 | 51
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