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Forum Home  →  Discussion  →  Housing costs  →  Thread

Termination for failure to provide information, validity of request

Mr Finch
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Benefits adviser - Isle of Wight CAB

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Total Posts: 509

Joined: 4 March 2011

Hi,

We have a HB claimant who was sent a letter with a link to the council’s website, asking her to complete a review form. The review form is the same as a new claim form.

As she isn’t digitially literate and the website is especially difficult to use, she wasn’t able to do this, so the suspension and termination provision has been used.

As well as individual grounds of challenge such as her inability to use the website, is this challengeable as not being an information request? I argue it is because, there is no list of the information requested, only a link where the claimant must jump through a certain number of hoops on page 1 before being allowed to get to the next page where more hoops are presented. The claimant has no way to know in advance what information to gather as she can’t look through the whole form for it. I can’t get through the form with her either as there is no truthful answer to some of the questions, e.g. what date does your tenancy end (dd/mm/yyyy)

Any thoughts welcome.

Timothy Seaside
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Housing services - Arun District Council

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Joined: 20 September 2018

I would tend to agree with you. This sounds more like a task than an information request. Reg 14 says that termination follows failure to comply with an information requirement, but it doesn’t say anything about tasks. And the caselaw is clear that the information requirement has to be sufficiently specific.

There’s some good pointers and caselaw on this thread: https://www.rightsnet.org.uk/forums/viewthread/16539/

Dan Manville
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Greater Manchester Law Centre

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Joined: 22 January 2020

One of those jobs where a quiet word in someone’s ear will probably fix it. It’s just knowing who to speak to,,,