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Forum Home  →  Discussion  →  Universal credit administration  →  Thread

UC sanctions and housing costs

chris smith
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Another issue.

Obviously if UC is withdrawn altogether no housing costs are paid, but do the UC sanctions apply to housing costs?  Where does it say this?

Gareth Morgan
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Reg. 111 sets out the Daily Reduction Rate as the Standard Allowance (or sometimes 40% of it) which is the adult element of a UC award.

chris smith
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So if you are under 25 then you are b…..d?

Gareth Morgan
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They’ll have a lower Standard Allowance to be sanctioned on.

zoeycorker
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I raised this issue at a recent UC training session - when looking at couple claims - if one member of the couple is sanctioned then how does that apply - the trainer fed this back to the UC implementation team and this was the response:

Stage 1 – Calculate the UC Maximum Amount by adding up the sums of money which are attached to the various UC elements the adults and relevant child dependents in the benefit unit are entitled to.

Stage 2a – Take the UC Maximum Amount and then calculate the UC Adjusted Award by taking the UC Maximum Amount and then (a) making any necessary reductions in light of the capital, income and earnings available to the assessment unit and then (b) making any necessary adjustments in light of the Benefit Cap and Transitional Protection requirements.

Stage 2b – Take the UC Adjusted Award and then calculate actual UC Entitlement by taking the UC Adjusted Award and making any reductions necessary for conditionality sanctions attributed to the benefit unit. This then represents the UC entitlement for the benefit unit.

Stage 3 – Take the UC Entitlement and then calculate the actual UC Payment – by taking account of any Fraud Sanctions and then any Third Party Deductions, sums for overpayment recovery & (repayments of) any short-term/budgeting advances etc. This is the actual amount of UC that will be physically paid to the benefit unit.

Therefore you cannot when applying a sanction think in terms of standard allowance, housing element etc. You must think in terms of – stage 2a above. What is the amount of the UC adjusted award and if a sanction is applicable apply it to the UC adjusted award. The housing element is not protected. For example:

Couple standard allowance over 25: £493.95
Housing element: £300.00
Sub total = £793.95

Earnings = £200

UC adjusted award = £593.95

If a sanction is applicable you apply it to £593.95.


this is going to cause issues around rent payments surely?

DaphneH
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Not sure what the UC iimplementation team were says there Zoey but reg 111 is clear that is you are a couple it is half the standard allowance that is sanctioned (para 5) - it doesn’t impact on the housing costs element

FIT Advisor
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Making it very complicated…my understanding is the housing costs are not ‘protected’, so for example single claimant in work gets £400 month UC including housing element, sanctioned for not trying to secure additional hours, would lose the personal allowance @£313.73 leaving £86.27 UC but weekly rent is £85 or £368.33 per calendar month so effectively impacting on housing element. Suppose we have to stop thinking of the ‘parts’ of UC and apply accordingly. Would be very happy for someone to tell me I am wrong.

Gareth Morgan
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DaphneH - 26 January 2015 12:10 PM

reg 111 is clear that is you are a couple it is half the standard allowance that is sanctioned (para 5) - it doesn’t impact on the housing costs element

Unless they’re both sanctioned.

Gareth Morgan
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sanwyp - 26 January 2015 07:47 PM

for example single claimant in work gets £400 month UC including housing element, ... would lose the personal allowance @£313.73 leaving £86.27 UC but weekly rent is £85 or £368.33 per calendar month so effectively impacting on housing element.

But in that case there must be other income (or an incredibly low LHA) and under current scheme it’s likely that there would only be a reduced HB with those figures.

Cordelia
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Gareth Morgan - 27 January 2015 12:16 PM
sanwyp - 26 January 2015 07:47 PM

for example single claimant in work gets £400 month UC including housing element, ... would lose the personal allowance @£313.73 leaving £86.27 UC but weekly rent is £85 or £368.33 per calendar month so effectively impacting on housing element.

But in that case there must be other income (or an incredibly low LHA) and under current scheme it’s likely that there would only be a reduced HB with those figures.

These figures work for me if I give the claimant earnings of £126 per week.

For comparison they would get £53.41 per week HB under the current system, so are initially better off on UC.  Once the UC sanction kicks in the old system looks like the better option.

Gareth Morgan
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Thanks Cordelia.  That make my point about there not being full housing support in the current system either.

I think people have to accept that there are no separate bits in the amount of Universal Credit just in the assessment of needs. As Gertrude Stein would have said UC is UC is UC.

ps. Awaiting responses from Wrexham re date of next meeting.

Daphne
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Of course if a claimant had earnings of £126 in the current system they wouldn’t be sanctioned because they would be outside JSA - that’s in-work conditionality for you!

FIT Advisor
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It had to be an in work example, if not then it would impact on the personal element. Well done for working out the earnings and yes, the lesson is not to separate components…it is all UC.

[ Edited: 28 Jan 2015 at 10:40 pm by FIT Advisor ]
HB Anorak
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I think Daphne has nailed the key point here. The issue is not the sanctioning of housing costs per se, which don’t exist as a discrete amount in the final generic UC award: it is the fact that for the first time people can be sanctioned if they are doing a fair amount of work but not enough to achieve their threshold.  These will include cases where, under the legacy schemes, they got nothing from DWP and partial HB from the Council.  These are people who only qualify for UC at all because of their housing costs, so you could reasonably say that the UC they receive is for housing costs ... but on the other hand you could just as resonably say they have enough earnings to pay their rent and the UC is to support their living costs.  In UC there is nothing to say which end you start at - it doesn’t follow that the standard rate gets tapered first, then child additions, then extra bits and finally housing costs.  We have to stop thinking in the old way!

The same issue arises with DHPs: depending which end you start at there could be a tiny shortfall between UC and full rent or a very large one.

@Paul_chc
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Hi, I have followed this thread for some time but am still confused. If UC is a single payment without a discrete housing cost, what have the DWP confirmed they will share with landlords? The announcement last week suggests they will be data sharing with landlords the ‘housing element’ of an award, could this be argued is for housing and therefore shouldn’t be sanctioned? Or am I being too simplistic with this simplified benefit.

Andrew Dutton
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Another thought -

Claimant is sanctioned and the standard allowance is taken away. The ‘housing’ element remains in payment so they have some UC coming in.

Claimant has to spend ‘housing’ money on living costs as they’re broke, gets in to rent arrears.

What’s to stop this happening?

I’d also like to think that the remaining ‘housing’ element in payment will not be treated as an available resource when hardship payments are considered. But if it’s not really a ‘housing’ payment then…..?

FIT Advisor
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At a meeting today, DWP reps advised (stressed) that the housing element is protected when a sanctioned applied. I suggested that this would be the case in JSA single claimant…..sanction applied is equivalent to standard personal element….so they are left with the housing element in payment and as pointed out out above will be used to survive until a hardship payment secured (is this repayable?)

I put forward the situation when it is an in work UC claimant and there was still a view that housing element protected. Sure it will all become clearer when the social experiment as outlined by Lord Freud commences in April.

I stand by what I and others have said, we need to think of UC as a whole not part personal part housing costs and the individual is at risk of having a benefit reduced because of the sanction that puts ability to pay rent at risk (if not impossible)

What happens when someone is sanctioned will be very much up to that individual to deal with, although I hope that there will be independent advice readily available to challenge such situations.  They will have a reduced income, not sure if data sharing will include DWP advising of sanction which would enable an alert to be given to Social Landlords.

Housing Providers will have to deal with non payment quickly to establish if linked to sanction.  Standard arrears letters will not be the answer.

SarahJBatty
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Thank you all for posting a worked example of this scenario, which I covered in training for front line housing staff this week. 

The personal allowance figures just provides the maximum amount of the sanction, but the sanction is then applied to the UC award.  We need to stop thinking of the housing costs element as a separate benefit.

zoeycorker
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I’m worried about how this will impact my tenants in reality. Best way forward at moment is to educate my tenants to ensure they dont get bloody sanctioned.!

Andrew Dutton
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Good idea but that assumes that if the claimant behaves correctly, s/he will not be sanctioned. Not a safe assumption if UC follows current JSA sanction trends.  Yep, I’m that cheerful today…

Gill
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I am dealing with this exact issue in that I have a client with occupational pension and therefore about £1 odd standard allowance UC, but housing costs element of £345 odd monthly. He has a higher level sanction and has consequently lost all his UC. Argument from DWP is (presumably) that he pays his rent from his pension, thus losing his living costs (= the point of the sanction) but the fact remains that he is worse off now than he would have been before,  when his JSA would have gone but his HB would have continued.
I am sure I read a minister saying housing costs would be protected but can’t find it anywhere…..

nevip
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sanwyp - 30 January 2015 07:06 PM

At a meeting today, DWP reps advised (stressed) that the housing element is protected when a sanctioned applied. I suggested that this would be the case in JSA single claimant…..sanction applied is equivalent to standard personal element….so they are left with the housing element in payment and as pointed out out above will be used to survive until a hardship payment secured (is this repayable?)

I put forward the situation when it is an in work UC claimant and there was still a view that housing element protected. Sure it will all become clearer when the social experiment as outlined by Lord Freud commences in April.

I stand by what I and others have said, we need to think of UC as a whole not part personal part housing costs and the individual is at risk of having a benefit reduced because of the sanction that puts ability to pay rent at risk (if not impossible)

What happens when someone is sanctioned will be very much up to that individual to deal with, although I hope that there will be independent advice readily available to challenge such situations.  They will have a reduced income, not sure if data sharing will include DWP advising of sanction which would enable an alert to be given to Social Landlords.

Housing Providers will have to deal with non payment quickly to establish if linked to sanction.  Standard arrears letters will not be the answer.

It’s all very well DWP staff making glib assurances.  Meanwhile, in the real world, last year I had a client with a brain injury on UC who had been sanctioned 5 times in as many weeks for not putting in the full 35 hour per week work search.  He was doing 20-25 hours due to his health problems, and even that was making him ill.  His UC payments were erratic, different amounts each month, some months no payment at all.  Inevitably, rent arrears and a re-possession order.  Court hearing had already been adjourned and relisted. 

I requested an expedited tribunal in light of this and TTS, at DJ’s direction, listed the hearing the day before the court hearing.  Luckily we won the appeal and his housing lawyer was then able to win his case in court.  It was all very last minute. The PO tried feebly to argue (I don’t think his heart was really in it) that the sanctions should stand as, even in spite of his limitations, he wasn’t doing everything reasonably expected to find work.  The tribunal was having none of that.  I got the sense that the various DWP officers, including the PO, were ‘under instruction’.

 

HB Anorak
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Gill: What your client has is £346 of generic UC - don’t think of it as £1 standard and £345 housing.  It would have been £660-odd if he didn’t have the pension income.  Julia and Glenys (aka mycatismo on here) at Housing Systems came up with the very helpful analogy that UC is like a smoothie: at the start of the process you put different bits of fruit into the jug - one for personal living costs, one for housing etc, then blitz them and they are no longer separate fruits.  The amount of smoothie in the jug can be reduced by the taper (eg your client’s occupational pension - pour out some smoothie) and/or a sanction (pour out some more smoothie) and if there is anything left that is the amount of UC paid.  In your client’s case there is hardly anything left - the taper and the sanction have almost drained the jug.

Yes he is worse off than under legacy benefits because he would have had only a few coppers a week of JSA and full HB and only the few coppers of JSA could be sanctioned.  That is because HB is a completely separate benefit and it has no job seeking conditions.

To protect the housing element (and possibly other elements apart from the standard allowance) would require the UC regs to be amended to say that the sanction is the lesser of:

- an amount equal to the standard allowance, and
- the amount (if any) of “adjusted” (ie tapered) UC entitlement in excess of the sum of the elements other than the standard allowance comprising the original max UC (£1 in your case)

But that’s not the way it is I’m afraid.

[ Edited: 2 Feb 2016 at 12:56 pm by HB Anorak ]