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Forum Home  →  Discussion  →  Housing costs  →  Thread

. Detox (stage 2), specified accom / housing costs / two homes and UC

Greeny
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Salford Welfare Rights (Health)

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Total Posts: 33

Joined: 3 April 2017

Blimey,  First thing on a Monday! I need more tea and a bit of help from you lot.

I have just had a call from a gentleman I helped with a PIP claim earlier this year. Sadly he has saved my number and had this stinker saved especially for me on this dull Mancy Monday!

He income is UC with housing element paid. He has LCWRA and has earnings from a PT job £525m. He gets housing costs paid for his one bed flat.

He has been offered a place on a stage 2 detox which means it a domiciliary placement - therapeutic. I am ssured it is classed as a specified accom and other residents costs are covered by HB.

I have established he can have 6 months absence from his normal home and UC will continue to pay his housing costs but I am unsure if HB will also pay the costs on his rehab and if they do what income will they use to assess his claim?

Any help appreciated.

Yasmin

 

HB Anorak
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Benefits consultant/trainer - hbanorak.co.uk, East London

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Total Posts: 2895

Joined: 12 March 2013

The problem is you can only get HB or UC housing costs for the dwelling normally occupied as the home, unless you are treated as occupying another home as well/instead.  It’s HB he needs to convince: there does not seem to be anything wrong with him getting a UC housing element for up to six months’ absence from what seems from your description to be his long term normal home.  HB would have to find a way of treating him as occupying the rehab place, and they will probably start from a presumption that it isn’t where he normally lives.  Nor does it appear that his circumstances meet any of the conditions for being treated as occupying two homes: he’s not a student with a non-student partner, he’s not fleeing domestic violence, he’s not waiting for disability adaptations.

The best he can hope for is that HB and UC take completely opposite views about which place he normally lives in: HB says he normally lives in the detox place and has permanently ceased to occupy the other home. while UC decides that he is temporarily absent from the other home.  As a matter of law it is quite possible for the two departments to make those decisions independently of one another.

You would normally expect a detox establishment to be a registered care home or even a hospital and funding to be organised by the NHS or adult social care.  Housing Benefit is a poor fit for people who use the service temporarily while maintaining a long term home elsewhere.