DWP abandons Universal Credit rent change ‘bulk uploads’

Inside Housing are reporting that “Ministers have abandoned plans to allow social landlords to update the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) about changes to tenants’ rents in bulk after testing the system for 18 months.

More here DWP abandons Universal Credit rent change ‘bulk uploads’

Another UC success story…..

They abandoned that plan before Christmas. The landlord portal currently has an update (in the shiny new “Updates” tab) to say “We recommend showing your tenants how to report rent and service charges to us.” Obviously we are thrilled that we now need to put time aside to help with something that is done automatically with HB. Since last year’s rent increases (which you will recall were the first increases for four (?) years) we have been trying to track down the tenants who haven’t notified their rent increases, but there doesn’t appear to be a reliable way of doing it, and even when we identify them we still have the obstacle of getting the tenant to change it (and when you bear in mind that they are missing out on about £10 per month on average, it’s apparent that this isn’t for lack of incentive).

In their defence, the DWP are at least talking about giving all of our tenants a To-Do where they are prompted to notify the rent increase. But it’s not really ideal, and it’s not really clear why bulk uploads wouldn’t be a better solution, or even why they couldn’t give us a way of manually correcting (or just alerting them of) the rent amount if we notice it’s wrong.

I helped a tenant the other day who was still being paid housing costs based on their 2018-19 rent (which was actually very similar to their 2020-21 rent). I helped them update the rent, but had no option but to skip the 2019-20 rate and go straight for 06/04/2020.

For those without access to the landlord portal these kinds of updates often seem to be communicated here: https://www.understandinguniversalcredit.gov.uk/universal-credit-and-landlords/landlord-portal/