Absent Joint Tenants - UC update

from UC Portal today…..
14 December 2022
We have changed how you tell us about absent joint tenants
You should use the ‘Provide tenancy details’ to-do to tell us about tenancies with an absent joint tenant. You will not have to email a manual Social Rented Sector (SRS) form.

Answer Yes to ‘Is this person your tenant and liable for rent at this address?’, then complete the to-do.

We will verify the information and calculate the correct housing payment. The tenancy will stay on the landlord portal.

....fingers crossed

Am I missing something here? The whole point about the old bodge was that by ticking “no” to the question “Is this person your tenant and liable for rent at this address?” you got a free text box where you could say there was an absent joint tenant. If we’re ticking “yes” now then we don’t get a free text box. So how are we notifying them that there’s an absent joint tenant? Surely they’re just going to default to paying half the rent?

Hi
first of these has come in ....
LA tenant has updated her annual rent increase, and guess what? UC statement has reverted to paying 50% of rent due to an absent joint tenant.
I’m thinking the error is in how the LA has verified the new housing costs, based on the posts above, that they haven’t completed the to-do…
Exact same thing happened to her last year when the rent annual increase took effect, and took a couple of months to fix. She is justifiably very stressed.

This was a significant issue for us last year as well - absent joint tenant cases where the rent increase notification caused them to revert to receiving only 50% (or in a couple of cases, 33%) of the rent. I think we’ve just about finished confirming the rent increases now, so I’m still hoping it’s all going to be fine this year.

If the tenant does the rent increase to-do as it’s supposed to be done then landlords just have to say whether it’s their tenant, and if it is, then they have to confirm the rent and eligible service charges and date of increase. There is no way to indicate an absent joint tenant, number of bedrooms, etc.

If the tenant completes a housing costs change of circumstances then the landlord is asked whether it’s their tenant, are there any other tenants, how many bedrooms are there, are there any rent free weeks, and what are the housing costs. Previously the UC bodge was to tick “no” to the first question and then use a free text box to notify absent joint tenant cases. Now we are not supposed to use this bodge, so it’s entirely up to UC and the tenant to get it right. Most of the time that means we can just call the tenant and make sure they know what’s going on, but when we are in the middle of confirming rent increases for 1100 tenants it’s not really practical.

It’s a shambolic system.

I was helping a tenant with a “where you live and what it costs” change of circs yesterday. Their partner and joint tenant has moved out so it is now an absent joint tenant case. The questions about joint tenancy have changed since last time I saw them (which is admittedly quite a while). After saying there were 2 joint tenants, there was a question about whether the other joint tenant was living in the property. So they are specifically trying to pick this up now. This may explain why a) we seem to be having fewer problems with getting people accepted as absent joint tenant cases, and b) the old bodge on the landlord portal is no longer relevant.

Progress.