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Are APA MPTL being paid straight away now?

Timothy Seaside
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Housing services - Arun District Council

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Managed Payments to Landlords of housing costs have always been paid in bulk on a four week schedule which causes additional arrears and confusion. This month we have started to see some housing costs payments coming straight into rent accounts and the ones I’ve checked suggest that the payments are coming in on the tenants’ UC payment date.

I’m still waiting for clarification from our liaison officers, but I thought I’d ask whether any other landlords have started to see similar payments? At the moment I don’t know whether it’s a mistake, or a local thing, or perhaps a national change.

If it’s deliberate then it’s a very positive move.

Charles
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Accountant, Haffner Hoff Ltd, Manchester

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VRW
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Livin Housing

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Timothy Seaside - 27 October 2020 11:31 AM

Managed Payments to Landlords of housing costs have always been paid in bulk on a four week schedule which causes additional arrears and confusion. This month we have started to see some housing costs payments coming straight into rent accounts and the ones I’ve checked suggest that the payments are coming in on the tenants’ UC payment date.

I’m still waiting for clarification from our liaison officers, but I thought I’d ask whether any other landlords have started to see similar payments? At the moment I don’t know whether it’s a mistake, or a local thing, or perhaps a national change.

If it’s deliberate then it’s a very positive move.

we’ve started receiving the payments same day as the tenants. we get a notification through the LL portal explaining how much were getting and the date were getting it

we have had a lot of double payments on some rent accounts for the last payments of the 4 weekly schedule and the new MPTL

Timothy Seaside
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Housing services - Arun District Council

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Thanks Charles. It’s starting to feel like the DWP is deliberately keeping us out of the loop.

VRW - 27 October 2020 12:30 PM

we’ve started receiving the payments same day as the tenants. we get a notification through the LL portal explaining how much were getting and the date were getting it

we have had a lot of double payments on some rent accounts for the last payments of the 4 weekly schedule and the new MPTL

Our last four weekly payment was 14 October, and our first one of these new payments was on 10 October. The finance team accidentally ran the payment schedule again on 19 October, so we ended up with some tenants showing three months of payments in a week. I’ve spent quite a lot of time unpicking this mess.

It’s nice that the Payments tab on the LL portal is now doing something! It’s been there for months, but wasn’t showing anything. Now we know what it’s for.

It’s good that this is getting sorted out now, but in reality the system should never have been set up like it was. The old system was causing us around £100,000 in arrears, as well as significant amounts of time checking for missed payments, and explaining to tenants why their rent account didn’t show a payment they’d had from UC three weeks earlier, etc.

Seems the third party payments are going to continue on the four weekly schedule though.

HB Anorak
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Seen a case today where DWP is referring to a “secondary monthly payment” and I can only assume this means the new APA pcm functionality - is that correct?  Anyone aware of this being the new jargon for APAs/managed payments?

Charles
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Haven’t seen this, but could they be referring to the facility to be paid more often than monthly (usually this means receiving half the payment on the normal date, and the other half two weeks later). I believe this is increasingly common in Scotland where anyone can request this.

Timothy Seaside
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Housing services - Arun District Council

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I know some of our tenants get the More Frequent Payments APA, and I believe they have to have MPTL to be able to get those. We now have nearly a whole month of payments on the landlord portal and I haven’t seen anything to suggest that any of them are paying the MPTL twice per month.

From memory, I think they still get a single monthly payment statement so the housing costs aren’t split anywhere - just the payment they receive.

Like VRW, we had a lot of tenants who got two payments very close together - so that could be what they mean. But it seems unlikely because generally the people in the service centres and jobcentres have never been aware of how the APA payments were made. We got regular queries from claim managers, passing on queries from our tenants who had noticed that their UC payment hadn’t appeared on their rent account yet, and it was always because of the delay built into the system.

[ Edited: 29 Oct 2020 at 12:59 pm by Timothy Seaside ]
Charles
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Timothy Seaside - 29 October 2020 12:52 PM

I know some of our tenants get the More Frequent Payments APA, and I believe they have to have MPTL to be able to get those. We now have nearly a whole month of payments on the landlord portal and I haven’t seen anything to suggest that any of them are paying the MPTL twice per month.

From memory, I think they still get a single monthly payment statement so the housing costs aren’t split anywhere - just the payment they receive.

Interesting. It would certainly be logical to pay the MPTL in one payment.

Timothy Seaside
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Charles - 29 October 2020 12:58 PM

Interesting. It would certainly be logical to pay the MPTL in one payment.

Yes. The rationale for MFP is that the claimant can’t cope with budgeting over the month so they need it more frequently. The rationale for MPTL is that the claimant can’t manage their finances so they need DWP to make the payment for them - but not more frequently.

And paying MPTL more frequently doesn’t make sense (under the new payment system) because we are now getting the whole month’s payment for an AP a week after the AP ends. Splitting it would mean we’d get half of it one week after the AP ends, and half of it three weeks after the end of the AP it relates to - increasing arrears.