Shared ownership housing costs (no bedroom tax) or APA (with bedroom tax)

In common with HB, bedroom tax does not apply to UC housing costs in shared ownership housing.

To put my frustration in some context, we’d previously spent nearly a year on the client’s live service claim, getting UC to accept that bedroom tax didn’t apply to shared ownership rent.

After struggling along with full service for a few months and not managing to pay the rent, she asked for an APA. Rent payments started going to the landlord, but minus 25%.

So we asked them again to look again at their decision to apply the bedroom tax.

UC’s response came the same day. It was a bit confused, but essentially it said the bedroom tax was being applied because the APA could only be paid to a social landlord. But “council or housing association tenant” and “shared ownership” are mutually exclusive on the UC housing costs options (you can only pick one from the list).

So the tenant has been left being paid the UC HCE herself (which hasn’t worked so far) but if she wants an APA they’ll apply the social sector size criteria rules.

Then I noticed that the client is still getting housing costs at last year’s rent level. So we tried to do a change of circumstances online. But there doesn’t appear to be any way to say what the rent is after clicking the shared ownership option.

Is the UC computer system really this bad? And what do we do?

On a practical level we got the landlord to set up a DD. Hopefully that will work (and if it does work it will be better than an APA - reduced payment delay, no confusing missed 13th payment every year, more transparency).