Housing Benefit Changes

As you may have read in the press or seen on the news during the last few weeks, the Government is introducing big changes to the benefits system. You need to understand how these changes will affect you and start to prepare for them.

The first change to affect a lot of our residents is that from April 2011, if you are on housing benefit and you have adult (18 years or over) children living with you, the amount of benefit you get will reduce. Adult children are expected to contribute to your housing costs, so the Government makes a ‘non dependent deduction’ from your Housing Benefit to reflect this. These deductions will be bigger from April, so you will get less money and the grown up children living with you will be expected to make up the difference or you will have to make up the difference from your own money.

The amount by which your housing benefit will reduce will depend on your individual circumstances but on average most peoples’ housing benefit will be reduced by between £1.50- £10 per week for each adult child in the household. You need to discuss this with your family and decide how you will make up this money.

The next big changes aren’t introduced until April 2013 but you also need to start to think about them because you may need to make some important decisions, which need a lot of thought.

From April 2013 if you have been on Job Seekers Allowance (JSA) for one year your housing benefit will automatically be cut by 10%. It’s hard to plan for this change because you obviously don’t know what your circumstances may be in 2 or 3 years time, but if you have already been on JSA for a while it may be worth looking at your options now. Are there any free training courses you could do to help you back into work? If you are still claiming JSA in April 2013, how will you find this extra money?

The other change that will be introduced in April 2013 is that if you are working age and you live in a property that is bigger than you and your family need, your housing benefit will be cut. The Government class having more than one spare bedroom as ‘under occupation’, so if you have two or more spare bedrooms your housing benefit will be cut – but please note this will not affect elderly tenants.

If you are working age and you are under occupying your home now is the time to think about this. If you decide that you will need to move to a smaller home this can take a long time to plan and prepare for, so the earlier you start to think about this, the better.

We will give you as much help and support as possible to enable you plan for these changes. Please contact your Housing Officer if you would like further information.

AHousing Benefit changes impact assessment calculator is available for you to be able to assess how you could be affected by the changes in housing benefit.

How to use the Housing Benefit changes impact assessment calculator:

1. You need to fill in the purple shaded ‘cells’: all others cells are protected from being overtyped.
2. Firstly, type in your weekly rent amount. The rent is needed to assess the impact of the loss of benefits and is used for calculating the deductions for job seekers allowance over 52 weeks and under occupancy.
3. You then need to enter the future rent increases as two of the deductions take effect in 2013 and 2014. (The figure has been entered at 5% but you can change this).
4. The first entry requires entry to identify if you have non dependant deductions. If so, then the category should be selected and if not then 'not applicable'.
5. If you are in receipt of job seekers allowance then 'yes' should be selected otherwise 'no'.
6. The final entries are if you are under-occupying your home. Both the number of bedrooms for the property and number of bedrooms of under-occupancy are required. If the tenant is not in underoccupancy then zero should be entered in the under-occupancy.
7. The model then demonstrates the benefit receivable if the proposal changes did not take effect and then the camparison using the current assumptions.