HB claim closed due to not moving in to new property straight away

We have a tenant who moved in 3 days after her tenancy start date (she had difficult personal circumstances and stayed with a friend for those 3 days). She notified the Local Authority of her change of address for her HB claim a week later. Two months later the LA made a decision on the change of circumstances and closed her claim. Their reasoning was that she was not occupying either property for those 3 days so her HB had to end and advised her to claim UC. The tenant asked for a review but the LA confirmed their decision by saying, “Although your rent liability was continuous from one address to another, your occupancy was not continuous”. I thought this should have been a straightforward change of address and if the LA felt there was a gap in entitlement for those 3 days they could have dealt with it as a closed period supersession? I have appealed the decision with that argument - am I correct or have I missed something? Also, it has been three and half months since the appeal letter was submitted – what period of time is reasonable for an LA to respond and can you appeal directly to the Tribunal if they are taking too long?

Yes this sounds like a bad decision.

There is no HB entitlement except for a property which you (a) have a liability to pay rent for and (b) normally occupy as your home. The position of the LA seems to be that there was a three day period of disentitlement where he had ceased to occupy the first property (so had no entitlement in relation to that property) and had not yet begun to occupy the second property so had no HB entitlement.

As you correctly point out, the situation had been remedied by the decision date so the correct action if they are right is for a closed period supersession to be undertaken. Your client was in fact entitled to HB at the point at which the decision was taken.

However I am not sure that the LA can even say there was a period of disentitlement at all. Even if your client spent the first three nights of their tenancy sleeping at a friends house, it seems to me that they can perfectly fairly say it had become their home. They had taken on a tenancy there, given up their tenancy elsewhere and were proposing to physically move in over the next few days. I am not sure that the fact that they had not yet physically spent the night there really prevents them establishing occupancy. It is possible for your home to be somewhere you have not yet been - see R (H) 9/05.

Thanks Elliot for your reply - very helpful