The unlawful sub-letting of social housing deprives those in genuine need of housing and places a huge strain on public finances, yet it remains a civil rather than criminal offence.

We must criminalise tenancy fraud if we are to start addressing this problem on the scale that is required. The government’s ‘national crackdown’ has demonstrated that this is a problem of intolerable size. But with 50,000 properties being sub-let at an estimated cost of £75,000 per property every three years, and 1.76 million households on the social housing register, surely this is the time to think more radically about how we deal with this offence.

In recent years we have seen councils and social landlords make great progress in tackling tenancy fraud, but the work of housing investigators remains hampered by substantial barriers to information sharing. We need to unblock these information flows between agencies by giving legal clarity to gatekeepers who are unwilling to stray into the grey areas of the Data Protection Act for what is currently a civil offence.

Criminalising tenancy fraud will also help change institutional and societal attitudes. Our research, in our ‘Don’t let on’ paper published last week, found that 68 per cent of housing professionals we surveyed felt the offence is not taken as seriously as other types of benefit fraud by members of the public. And 46 per cent felt other agencies do not take it as seriously.

In addition, 92 per cent felt that establishing parity between unlawful sub-letting and other types of benefit fraud would help their efforts to tackle tenancy fraud.

Legal change is now vital to the efforts of councils and other social landlords to minimise high social and financial costs of tenancy fraud.

Tom Symons is a senior researcher at New Local Government Network

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