Rental areas changed to duck Lords ruling
The government has changed the definition of rental areas used to set housing benefit levels, to avoid a House of Lords decision that would have forced them to redraw the boundaries.
The Department for Work and Pensions this week pushed through changes to the Rent Officers (Housing Benefit Functions) Order 1997, a legal document setting out how rental areas are determined.
It followed a House of Lords judgement in July last year which found favour with Sheffield tenant Daniel Heffernan, who argued that a new city-wide rental area used to determine his housing benefit was too large to be fair.
The law lords said rent officers had not followed the rules set out in the rent officers order when they had determined Mr Heffernan’s rental area. They stated that areas used to determine housing benefit should comprise the smallest number of neighbourhoods needed to satisfy the criteria for a rental area.
The department said that applying the Lords’ judgement to the rest of the country would have led to many smaller rental areas, which would have disadvantaged tenants in some areas by pushing down their housing benefit payments.
The change allows the department to retain the status quo by letting it draw rental areas more broadly than the Lords set out.
But the proposed amendments sparked anger among councils overseeing areas with tenants like Mr Heffernan, whose benefits have been reduced as a result of being pooled into larger rental areas together with cheaper neighbourhoods.
Mark Edmondson, benefits manager at Ribble Valley Council, argued that the new definition places too much discretion with individual rent officers. He wrote in his response to the consultation: ’The inevitable consequences will be wildly different approaches across the country and the creation of a postcode lottery.’
The DWP has also come under fire for giving councils and other interested parties just a week in November to comment on the changes.
It wrote in response: ‘The department recognises that a longer period of consultation would have been preferable. However, the implications of the judgement in the Heffernan case were so serious that urgent action was required.’
The department added that it had ‘considered carefully’ the comments received, but had decided to stick by its changes.
