RLA News Service

UK landlords have won a major victory in their battle to streamline the payment of rent arrears by housing allowance claimants.

And it all boils down to a cut in the time they have to wait before the arrears can be claimed.

The Residential Landlords Association - whose members own over 100,000 private rented properties throughout the UK - has campaigned for more flexibility since the government changed the system and decided to give housing allowance direct to claimants and trust them to pass it onto their landlords.

For, more often than not, the money got used for other things, rent arrears have grown and landlords have been threatening to take their properties off the housing allowance market.

One of their complaints has been about the eight week period that landlords have to wait before they can ask for arrears to be paid direct to them. But now, a tribunal ruling has cut that period by half.

The Department of Work and Pensions now says that, when a tenant has already skipped one month’s rent, the landlord can claim the arrears on the day after the second payment is missed.

“That effectively cuts the two-month wait to very little more than one month,” says the chairman of the Residential Landlords Association, Alan Ward.

“Councils should now follow this guidance – which will ease cashflow and financial losses for landlords who have been growing very wary of accepting housing allowance tenants in future.

“If the government was less rigid, and allowed tenants to have the allowance paid direct to landlords from the very start, the situation would further improve overnight.

“Landlords have felt so strongly that they have threatened to withdraw their properties from the housing allowance market and, if they did, then serious pressure would be shifted onto alternative housing – and there would be few winners if that happened.”