I have a client who has been in his privated rents room for several years but has never had a written tenancy agreement.
Under housing law tenancy agreements are not required, the mere payment of rent creates a contract and therefore a tenancy.

HB are refusing to pay and will only accept a tenancy agreement or a letter from his landlord. His landlord is not responding to several letters and text messages.

He previously paid his rent by cheque but is now 3 months in rent arrears and is getting worried.

Which bit of the HB regs insists on a tenancy agreement ?

"Which bit of the HB regs insists on a tenancy agreement ?"

None.

LAs are entitled to request such documents / evidence / information / certificates that are reasonably required in order to make a decision. The form of these items is not prescribed.

"Information", by definition, means it doesn't have to be "documentary". There are cases where the absence of "conventional documents" hasn't prevented HB being paid - see, for example, CH/0257/2005 & CH/3392/2006.

If a document does not exist, a LA cannot insist on its provision. But, the LA can ask for an appropriate pro-forma to be completed instead - see CH/3607/2007 where the LA asked for s/e "accounts" that the clmt did not have.

Ultimately, the LA can decide there is no rent liability. If it proceeds to Tribunal, it will simply boil down to the clmt's credibility and whatever evidence is actually available at the time.

The LA should not be too restrictive of the evidence that would be sufficient. So, proof of rent payments through copies of the cheques might do, for instance.

Just a brief word of warning.

One of our clients was told by frontline staff at the Council's One Stop Shop that a claim for HB would not be accepted without both a tenancy agreement and a rent book. Not unsurprisingly, she then went away and bought a standard tenancy agreement and rent card which were filled in and backdated. An attempt was made to make the rent card appear to be a contemporaneous document by using different pens to fill it out.

Outcome: both tenant and landlord received a formal caution for uttering a fraudulent document.

wish someone would teach HB staff some law...

I would wager that if/when your client produces a tenancy agreement in response to the LA's advice, he gets a 'contrived tenancy' decision.

I've seen that happen several times and in terms of the anger scale it's pretty high up there.

"Outcome: both tenant and landlord received a formal caution for uttering a fraudulent document."

Maybe its the lack of knowledge of criminal law on my part, but I'm struggling to see how the production of a document that simply reflects a genuine agreement already in place (presumably, verbally?), can be a "fraudulent document". On the face of it, either there was more to this case, or, the caution should not have been accepted.

Kevin:

Just to clarify the reasons why the documents were considered fraudulent.
(1) The tenancy agreement they used was a standard Assured Shorthold Tenancy Agreement downloaded from the internet. It contained a clause about a security deposit, and was completed to show that a deposit equivalent to one month's rent had been paid. In fact no deposit had been paid.
(2) The rent book was filled in going back several years, and this was done using different pens and different colours. There was a deliberate attempt to pass it off as a contemporaneous document.

What actually happened, though, was that after the caution was administered, the HB Department decided that nonetheless the claimant did have entitlement to HB and it was paid calculated back to the date of claim.