Housing costs for previous owner occupiers

Hi,

I know that in the Housing Benefit regs an owner occupier who sells their property and then become tenants of it cannot normally be entitled to any HB unless they had no option but to sell the property, i.e. mortgage rescue scheme.

Is anyone aware of a similar rule in UC and how UC would treat someone who rents the property they used to own?

Many thanks
Fflur

In UC, the catch-all commerciality and contrivance provisions do all the heavy lifting - there are very few specific situations expressly barred from attracting a housing element and this isn’t one of them.

When introducing UC, a lot of those provisions were culled. The remaining restrictions on entitlement can be found in sch 2, part 2 of the UC Regs:

https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2013/376/schedule/2

There is no provision directly equivalent to reg 9(1)(h) HB Regs which dealt with owner-occupiers, although it is always open to UC to argue that a particular arrangement is either a contrivance or is non-commercial (see reg 25(3)(a)).