How "housing benefits" work in the U.K.

Factual Questions
1

Recently I stumbled across a British television show called “If you can’t pay, we’ll take it away” on Netflix. It seems to be a reality show, following the actions of “High Court Enforcement Agents” as they carry out writs – mostly collecting debts and/or evicting tenants. It belongs in the ‘can’t look away from the trainwreck’ school of tv watching for me.

I’m sure I’m missing a lot of points (because the show was evidently made for British television so they don’t need to explain all sorts of things that everybody (British) knows … but to these Yankee eyes the way the eviction cases proceed seems to leap erratically from “unbelievably soft/indulgent” towards the debtor to “rigidly harsh” and then back again.

For example, one case went much like this:

Single mother with two children is set up in a flat by ‘the Council’ though the flat is owned and rented out by a private individual. The rent is a thousand pounds a month. It is decided that the woman in entitled to an 800 pound per month benefit/subsidy/allowance and she is supposed to come up with the other 200 pounds by whatever means. But rather than this Council paying the money to the landlord, they give it to the renter who is supposed to add her 200 pounds and pass it along to the landlord.

But the renter immediately decides screw the landlord, she’s keeping her own money and the money from the Council as well. Naturally this annoys the landlady, and she starts working on getting the renter out through a ‘county’ level court. But even though the renter is blatantly stealing 800/1000 pounds a month from the landlady, it take around 8-10 months to get that court to order the eviction. But the Council (apparently not at all concerned that the renter has been stealing their 800/mo for most of a year) tells the renter NOT to pack up and move out when the court rules against her. Rather they tell her to stay put wait until she gets some official notification with a date for when the bailiffs will show up, which it seems could be anything from another two weeks to two months later on. (I don’t know, maybe at least they stop sending the 800 a month to the renter at some point in the proceedings, it wasn’t clear.)

Anyway, apparently they tell her that AFTER she has received notice that the bailiffs are on the way, she should come back to them at that point, and they will proceed to “rehouse” her. Which seems to mean, they will find her another landlord to begin exploiting again? With not a hint of any legal consequences for what she did to the previous landlord?

Okay. To this point, it looks to me like the deadbeat renter is being coddled to a ridiculous degree.

But now the landlord somehow ‘moves it to the High Court’ (which seems to require the landlord paying something a bunch more fees or some such) and the High Court judge issues some sort of writ that basically allows the landlord to hire the High Court Enforcement Agents. (Despite the name, they seem to work for a private collection agency.)

And the coddling goes out the window! Gone is that 2 week to 2 month wait for appointment with the bailiffs. These collection agents can apparently show up within 24 hours AND they don’t have to send any letter or make a phone call or anything ahead of time. They can just show up, announce you have an hour to gather up some clothes and pills and id cards or whatever and then you’re out. Bam! The cases we show the agents generally bend that time quite a bit, they’re not heartless goons or anything, but mostly the people are out on the wrong side of new door locks within a handful of hours.

More amazing to my eyes is that the agents are seemingly free to do just about anything short of physical violence. They can break into the houses/flat, whether or not the renter is there. They drill locks, use crowbars, climb fences, prowl around the house in search of an unlocked door or climb in through windows…

And then the agents always tell the renter they just evicted to hurry on over to the Council, who are REQUIRED to set them up with emergency shelter right away (like in a hotel or something), and then move them into a new rented apartment or house or whatever after that, regardless of whether they’d just abused the system, either by stealing money or deliberately trashing the previous location.

Is that genuinely how it goes in the U.K.? Why in the world would any landlord ever agree to rent their property out under those rules??

2

Council-supported tenants are very unpopular with many landlords. Getting the right tenant is quite important and getting them out if they don’t work out can be quite a hassle.

3

I’ve only been in the U.K. for 3 years, having emigrated from Australia, so take that into account in my view, but the tenancy laws in the U.K. are generally ridiculously tenant friendly if the tenant knows the system and twists it as hard as they can. What you don’t see on many of those episodes is the lengths the tenant goes to to avoid an eviction.

It’s for that reason that it can be quite difficult to get into rental properties. Because I had no U.K. rental history I had to pay 6 months rent in advance (+ the bond) to secure a decent place. It’s far from unusual to see listings noting “No public benefits” although I believe they’re not suppposed to say that.

On the flip side, there are many tales of nightmare landlords, who take advantage of vulnerable renters as well.

The issue o& who the housing benefit is paid to, is a massive oversight to me, I can’t fathom why it is not paid direct to the landlord.

4

It’s complicated. Up until a few years ago, landlords really liked tenants on benefits because the council gave them the rent directly. This was changed for various reasons including the unscrupulous landlords gaming the rules. For example, they could rent their house to a relative for way over market price, use the rent to pay the mortgage and give a healthy profit besides. Effectively the taxpayers were buying them a house. On the other side, there is a trend to give people on benefits more control over their own finances, so that they can see that these things are not free. >simplification<

Evicting tenants is not easy. The court will almost always give them time to resolve the situation, often six months or more, during which the landlord gets a small payment or nothing. At the end of this time the landlord can go to the ‘high court’ and apply for an eviction order or a debt enforcement order. The debtor will be informed of the hearing and can turn up and make a case if they wish.

High Court Enforcement Officers do (or are supposed to) work to strict rules and often depend on their ‘victims’ not understanding - for example, there are rules about what they can seize for debt and rules about vulnerable people etc. The simple reason for their somewhat draconian powers of entry is that the debtor has reached the end of the line: they have ignored the previous ruling from the lower court and in spite of knowing full well that they have not paid any rent, still think that they can get away with it. A family that has been evicted (actually is out on the pavement with their luggage) will be rehoused by the Council. Public housing is in very short supply and there are long waiting lists, so they will not act on a threat of eviction, only the fact. Of course, once someone has been evicted they will be totally unable to get credit or rent privately.

These enforcement agents work for a licensed organisation whose income comes from the fees that get added on to the debt. These fees and charges can easily double the amount owed. One of their levers is to start listing goods for seizure. At some point, the mere act of listing can add considerably to the fees; if they actually whistle up a van, that adds even more.

5

I can understand how landlords could game the system like that, but I can’t understand how it would be prevented by giving the money to the renter directly who will supposedly pass on the money to the landlord. It seems one could still do that with a willing accomplice. It seems giving the money to the renter is introducing one extra point of failure for no benefit.

6

Huh. So it sounds like the show is representing the system fairly accurately…

It seems like an unsupportable system to me.

My impression is that this Council is required to provide housing (at least for any family that includes children or a ‘vulnerable’ individual) no matter what, and so somebody can choose to sell the appliances right out of the kitchen or punch holes in the walls or steal the housing benefits meant for the landlord and basically it’s all gain, no pain for them. It’ll take a year or even longer for you to have to leave…and all that happens is that you move to a new apartment and can do it all over again.

Isn’t that effectively training the renters to game and cheat the system? And won’t the ones who are in fact behaving ‘properly’ start to feel like chumps? Why the heck aren’t they ripping off the landlord? Why not use that lovely free money to buy playstations and big screen televisions and so forth?

OTOH, I can see it might be even more expensive to try to punish the offenders. They probably spent the stolen money right away, so you can’t fine them. If you refuse to give them new benefits/new apartments, you end up with families living on the streets. Send them to prison? Prisons are really expensive…and what do you do with all those children? Who will take care of them?

It seems like these people are effectively using their own poverty as an armor.

Added: this isn’t to say I think the British system is worse than the American one. Truth is, I’m not really sure how the American system works, except we do indeed have a huge (and growing?) number of people in really poor living conditions or flat out homeless. Are the only choices for a society to be hard-hearted or taken advantage of?

7

I’m watching this show, too, and I’m glad somebody thought to ask the question.

On several of the episodes, the agents will say on camera something about how many months the tenant has been living there rent-free while the case ground through the legal system.

A lot of times, the tenants will claim that they they had no notice, or knew nothing about an impending eviction, and the agents will very politely tell them, in essence, that they’re lying.

I’ve been amazed at the tactics the agents can use to gain access to a property. Here in America, I think they would get shot pretty quickly if repossession agents tried some of that stuff.

8

It’s not quite that easy. As GreedySmurf said, without a good history and/or a large deposit no private landlord will take you on. If and when the Council find you somewhere it is likely to be in a ‘sink’ estate or a tower block - both considered undesirable by ‘good’ tenants. Councils have the ability to effectively garnishee their rent, so they can get more protection.

Remember that these programs are heavily edited and obviously they will choose the more interesting cases. Few people have the bottle to take it to the line, and most people will try to come to some arrangement to avoid eviction. There are not many landlords who will allow their tenants to fall six months or more behind.

9

Perhaps the fact that housing disputes don’t end in shoot-outs is a feature, rather than a bug, of the social compact over here.

10

“No students, no DSS” is a common sight in rental adverts. (DSS = Department for Social Security, the former (and still colloquial) name for the government department that gives out benefits.)

11

I am not so sure about “No Students”. My daughter lives in Portsmouth (Hampshire) which is very much a university town. Many landlords there see students as desirable, partly because they will be gone in three years whatever. Rents often have to be guaranteed by parents anyway so they are seen as reliable and largely uncomplaining - (they are only there for 41 weeks and usually pay for 52).

12

There needs to be a balance between the rights of the landlord and those of the tenant. Back in the 60s in the UK things were weighted on the landlord’s side. That meant landlords could quickly and easily evict recalcitrant tenants, the upside being there was plenty of affordable and easily obtained rental premises. The Rachman case changed all that. Now the tenants had the upper hand and an Englishman’s home became his castle again. The problem was it was far more difficult to get that home in the first place as cheap and readily accessible housing became a thing of the past. My personal experience of these matters ended in the 70s when I became a home-owner but as far as I can gather the pendulum continues to swing now to this side now to that with each new government championing one or the other side but never seeming to achieve an equitable balance which resulted in equal protection for the landlord (which meant more housing available) and the tenant, who could be assured that as long as the rent was paid his home was secure.

Looking at the US you guys don’t seem any better at striking the right balance than we do.

13

Add to that that students will put up with having one of the living rooms converted to a bedroom (frequently only the kitchen and bathroom as common areas) and the sum of the individual rents is way more than the house could be rented for as a family home!

14

Am a UK (mature) student and renter; certainly see plenty of ‘No Students’ ads, as well as ‘No DSS’. Yeah, you can cram 'em in, and they’re generally easy to get rid of, but if it’s their first time living away from parents, they do tend to trash the place.

I will also point out, having personally been in the situation, that being in receipt of housing benefit isn’t necessarily a long term thing, and someone on it wasn’t always on it when they took the tenancy on. You can say you won’t take DSS tenants but you can’t kick someone out because they lose their job and start getting housing benefit, so long as they’re still paying the rent.

If you’re wondering if there are any consequences that hit people playing those sort of non-payment games well, yes there are, but it’ll be after the kids turn 18, or if she loses custody for some other reason. Then an eviction can be straight up out. The council would no longer be obliged to offer anything more than some form of shelter* (like a bed in a homeless shelter), there’s no way she’d be able to get a private rental having been evicted from a council property, and she’d never be eligible for further proper council housing.

The council housing situation is pretty odd sometimes here, it’s very much a binary in/out. Once you’re ‘in’, and have been allocated council housing, it’s very hard to get kicked out, and effectively impossible to get kicked out rather than just moved on if you have kids. Also, if you start earning more than the threshold, you don’t have to move out, you just have to pay the full rent, which is generally lower than market rate, so if the area’s OK, people often stay.

As a bonus, once you’ve been in a house for long enough, you also get the right to buy it at a discount from the council even if the council don’t actually own the property and has to buy it in order to sell it to you cheap.

But it can be very hard to get ‘in’, if you’re not in a vulnerable group. Which does of course give an incentive for women at risk of homelessness to get pregnant… It’s an issue that’s probably exaggerated by the press, but as a teenage girl, I knew other teenage girls who had a kid just to get housed. Had a (pregnant, homeless) friend suggest it to me when me and a boyfriend were trying to get a house, in fact. I declined…

*Actually, strictly speaking, the council are currently only obliged to provide ‘assistance’ to those not in a high priority group, but I believe the law is due to change next month to require provision of shelter. I wait with interest, especially as funding has not changed, and, fairly obviously given the rest of this post, council housing in some areas is already pushed to breaking point.

15

In the USA, ‘Section 8’ housing works in a similar manner, I think.

I had a friend a few years ago who had some rental apartments. He was a rarity among landlords, in that he would take Section 8 tenants. But he absolutely required that they had the government benefits portion paid directly to him. (I guess that the recipient can choose to get it paid either to them or direct to the landlord.)

He said that he was glad to have them as tenants. The government paid portion was usually at least half, and often 70-80% of the rent. So he knew that at least that much would be paid on time, and the check wouldn’t bounce. And if the tenants stopped paying their part, at least he still had the government-paid portion of the rent coming in for the months that it took him to evict them. (With other tenants, if they stopped paying, he had zero rent coming in while he worked to evict them.)

16

Also, having the council or a housing association as your landlord means having a good landlord, at least in my local area. Things get fixed, the housing stock gets upgraded with new windows, heating systems, kitchens etc. Almost all of the council estates where I live are actually OK - a mix of bought and rented these days of course - but the four-in-a-blocks in particular are really, really solid apartments, much better built than the new-build hutches that folk pay a hundred or two grand for locally.

17

I believe the downside is that you will get less desirable housing each time you move in this manner.

18

And, I want to add, the tenant isn’t always at fault in these scenarios. There have been many cases shown where the tenant was paying the rent and keeping the house reasonably nice and so on and just wanted to continue living there, but the landlord simply wanted them out because they had other plans for the property. Like to move back in themselves, to renovate it (and presumably raise the rent afterwards), or possibly to sell the property completely.

I don’t know how I feel about those cases. Yeah, it’s the landlords property, why shouldn’t he be able to live in his own house or sell it or whatever? But it puts the tenant in a nasty situation, because everybody says finding a decent apartment if you aren’t well off is really hard.

19

The landlord forfeited his right to use his property as he sees fit when he agreed to lease it out to another person.

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20

But not forever, right? I mean, generally a lease is for six months, a year, whatever, and after that term is up either party can say it’s over.

I don’t think I specified in the prior post, but those cases where paid-up tenants were being evicted were cases where the contracted term of their lease had run out and they were refusing to leave even though the landlord had refused to renew with them.