Any known portal issues in the past couple of weeks?

Dealing with an enquiry from a social landlord who say that they have been verifying their tenants’ new rents for the 20/21 year, but the claimants are being told that the verification has not been done.  This applies to both new claims and existing cases.  Unfortunately I don’t know yet whether they are on the portal or whether they are dealing with individual email requests.

Just wondered whether there is a known issue affecting this part of the service right now.  Is it likely to be the human/clerical link in the chain because they are just too busy with the surge in coronavirus-inspired new claims?  But then would that result in claimants being actively told “sorry we have not received verification from your landlord”?

Thanks in advance

Most of our verifications come through on the portal.

I got a client to do a rent increase on their UC account while we were on the phone last Friday, and it immediately came through to the portal, so presumably that part is automated. My understanding (based on experience) is that if the details we provide don’t match the details provided by the tenant, the tenant gets a “to-do” to confirm their housing details again, and if their details don’t match what we’ve put it comes back through on the portal. Ping pong.

We don’t see what the tenant has put, but I know the most common mismatch is people getting their rent wrong (e.g. doing their own conversion from weekly to monthly, because they are being helpful). But we also have issues with people misunderstanding joint tenancies.

The client I was working with last Friday had been having trouble with getting their housing costs included in their award. From our notes I could see that we had verified it at least three times over about six months. The client told me that they’d been told that we had refused to verify it - not true. I’ve now had confirmation from our partnership manager that the housing costs are on the claim, but are not being paid because it is with the investigation team - apparently they can’t get their heads around the idea that a couple who are joint tenants and who separate but continue to live in the same home (where they’ve been for thirty years) could be liable for half the rent each - even though that’s exactly the assumption they would be making if one of them had moved out. I mention this to illustrate the point that the DWP tells clients some wrong things about their housing costs (the most common one is probably the “we’ve already paid your housing costs to your landlord” - straight after the UC payment date, but before our next APA is due - which causes worry and confusion to people who check their rent accounts online).

Verifications that come through email (I ask myself why this happens) are clearly done manually, so the process will be different - although I suspect they just take the information we email them and put it onto their own version of the portal.

So I would say that if the information provided on the portal matches then that should be the end of it, but there may be hidden hold-ups like investigations which the DWP won’t tell claimants about. And if the information doesn’t match then we play ping pong until it does.

I guess there must be some sort of final check when the details do match - and I suspect that would be where tenants are being misinformed about what is going on. The DWP will not tell them they are under investigation, so should tell them their housing costs are being processed and are in a queue or something, but creative minds come up with off-script stories blaming the landlord or accusing the claimant of never having asked to have their housing costs paid (yes, even though they’ve asked us three times to verify them).

Obviously at the moment we are inundated with new claim verifications and it is coinciding with verifying rent increases, but we haven’t noticed anything different about the problems and mistakes - there are just more of them.

Excellent,  thanks very much.