Guidance

LA Welfare Direct Bulletin 9/2019

Updated 4 March 2024

Contact

If you have queries about the:

• technical content of this bulletin then contact details are given at the end of each article

• general content and distribution of this bulletin, contact [email protected]

Who should read

All Housing Benefit staff.

Action

For information.

Editorial

By the time you read this bulletin, the National Housing Benefit Debt Recovery statistics for the period April 2018 to March 2019 will have been published on GOV.UK. You will be pleased to note that the level of Housing Benefit (HB) debt outstanding has reduced slightly. It’s great that over 95% of local authorities (LAs) are now using the Housing Benefit Debt Service (HBDS) which helps you to trace current employment and address details for those people no longer in receipt of benefit, and I know from personal experience about some of the fantastic work done by LAs in connection with debt recovery. Remember that the Housing Delivery Division (HDD) Performance Development Team remains on point to help LAs with your debt recovery activities; please just contact them at [email protected] if you would like to discuss the support they can offer.

In this edition of LA Welfare Direct we make reference to the Self Employed Earnings Review, which I was personally involved in helping to set up. You’ll see that, through your efforts, a considerable saving was made to the public purse. I’d like to take this opportunity to thank all participating LAs for their hard work and particular thanks to colleagues in Hertsmere, Cambridge and South Oxfordshire LAs who helped to test the effectiveness of the proposal before we invited all other LAs to take part.

In the August edition of LA Welfare Direct, we mentioned the planned LA engagement events. I’m pleased to report that dates and venues are now sorted and that many LAs have booked their places. Many thanks to those LAs that offered rooms – we haven’t been able to take up all the offers this time round but as we intend to hold similar events in 2020 we will keep contact details for when we start to plan those. I hope that you find the autumn events useful.

Finally, it’s the Institute of Revenues Rating and Valuation (IRRV) annual conference in Telford on 8 to 10 October. Do drop in at the DWP stall if you would like to find out more detail about HDD’s current activities.

All the best,

Alan

Alan Brown
Fraud Error and Debt Lead
Housing Delivery Division

Incorrect HB debt recovery from debtor’s partners via Direct Earning Attachment

1. It has come to our attention that some local authorities (LAs) are inappropriately requesting a Direct Earning Attachment (DEA) from a debtor’s partner to recover Housing Benefit (HB) debt. This is not allowed under current legislation.

2. Although HB debt recovery legislation allows recovery of a HB debt from a partner’s benefit (providing they were the partner at the time the overpayment arose and still are when recovery is being made) it is not appropriate to recover via a DEA.

3. An alternative method of recovery that can achieve a good result is to agree with the partner to set up a direct debit to pay the debt off.

4. If you have any questions about the content of this article you can email [email protected]

Accessing data via Searchlight

5. LAs access Department for Work and Pensions (DWPs) and HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) claimant information via the Employee Authentication Service (EAS) to Searchlight. This information is shared on the understanding that access to Searchlight is only permitted for the administration of:

• HB
• Local Council Tax Reduction (LCTR)
• Local welfare provision
• Adult Social Care financial assessments
• Discretionary Housing Payments
• Disabled Facilities Grant

6. In this context ‘administration’ represents any action including face-to-face contact with claimants, appeals, recovery of overpayments, investigation of suspected benefit fraud and in connection with the disclosure of information as permitted by the Welfare Reform Act 2012.

7. Searchlight cannot be used for any unauthorised purpose. Users must not:

• attempt to trace, or access/view the records of self, friends, relatives, partners, colleagues or acquaintances or any other record for which there is no legitimate business reason for doing so
• make enquiries on behalf of colleagues in respect of friends, relatives, partners or acquaintances or anyone who is not permitted to receive information
• share EAS tokens, personal identification numbers or other identity credentials with colleagues

8. LAs must ensure that everyone who has access to claimant information regards security as part of their everyday duties.9. Enquiries relating to this article or any aspect regarding Searchlight security should be sent to [email protected]

Update: Pension Strategy Computer System uprating

10. DWP is responsible for sharing data with LAs on a yearly basis where the DWP Pension Strategy Computer System’s (PSCS) hosted benefits (for example, State Retirement Pension) have been uprated.

11. However, in previous year’s attempts to automate the process (in other words, provide via ATLAS (Automated Transfer to LA System)), have failed due to the size of the data transferred.

12. As advised previously, Housing Delivery Division’s (HDDs) LA Data Sharing Delivery (LADS) Team have been working with DWP digital architects and LA IT software suppliers to develop a solution to automate the process from December 2019 in time for April 2020 uprating activity.

13. We are approaching completion of testing the solution with your software suppliers and a number of them have already deployed the solution in their releases to LAs; with the remaining suppliers will be doing so imminently.

14. The next action we will be taking is to establish connectivity with each LA for the new PSCS solution. This activity cannot be undertaken until your LA is live with CIS (Customer Information System) Interest Automation as the PSCS solution will use the DWP API (Application Programming Interface) Gateway as access for this information. Therefore, if your LA is not already live with CIS Interest Automation it is important that this happens as a matter of urgency.

15. We will be getting in touch with your LA IT Single Point of Contact (SPOC) to notify them of what action will need to be taken to start the on-boarding process. It is important that the SPOC and the Revenues and Benefits managers work together to progress this.

16. Once implemented we anticipate LA staff will view the change in a positive manner as, ultimately, it will remove the requirement for them to manually uprate when conducting yearly reviews of claimant’s HB and LCTR claims. Providing access to accurate PSCS uprating amounts to the LAs will also ensure over and under payments do not occur or are limited.

17. If you require any further information, do not hesitate to contact [email protected]

Self-employed Earnings Review

18. With £1.49 billion of fraud and error overpayments, HB remains the biggest source of fraud and error in the benefits system. DWPs Fraud, Error and Debt Analysis (FEDA) team concluded that significant savings to Annually Managed Expenditure (AME) could be made if LAs were to review HB cases with recorded self-employed earnings; specifically, those which had not been looked at for 12 months or more.

19. HDD invited 3 LAs to participate in a pilot to test the viability of the Self-employed Earnings Review (SER). This exercise identified encouraging levels of savings for the volunteer LAs, with one LA stating the need to be more proactive in contacting claimants. In some cases, the SER had prompted claimants to declare other income and household changes.

20. As a result, the SER was proposed to LAs nationally and 364 LAs opted into the review.

21. HDD secured £5 million funding to support the LAs. This was distributed based on LA’s self-employed caseload, with a total of 72,000 referrals issued.

22. The review finished in March 2019. FEDA’s final analysis of the SER concluded that, due to the LAs action on the referrals generated, 44,000 cases had a change in their weekly entitlement which will result in an estimated national net AME saving of £97m.

23. Despite the short timescale in which the SER was delivered, the willingness of the LAs involved to fully engage with the review helped ensure that this massive saving to the public purse was achieved. DWP would like to thank all participating LAs for their invaluable support and hard work in making the SER such a success. HDD are now considering what comes next in this space.

24. A copy of the full SER report will soon be made available to participating LAs. In the meantime, if you have any queries about the content of this article you can email [email protected]

Removal and improvement of 6 HB Matching Service rules

25. We advised in July’s LAWD7/2019 that both HBRP004 and HBRP107 would be removed from your HB Matching Service (HBMS) referrals and permanently re-directed to DWP Counter Fraud Compliance Directorate (CFCD) for fraud investigation. We can now confirm that these rules will be removed from your HBMS file from September 2019.

26. Other planned changes to HBJS105, HBJS212, HBES105 and HBPC105 will also start in September 2019. For a period of time, these rules will be non-active and no referrals from these rules will be issued. Once the changes are complete, the rules will again become active and we will communicate the date from when the referrals will become available.

27. If you have any queries regarding the content of this article you can contact Karen Macaulay by phone on either 01253 689427 or 07785716585. Alternatively, you can email [email protected]

Secondment opportunity in Housing Policy Division

28. Working with LAs, as one of our major stakeholders in welfare reform, continues to feature heavily and for this reason we value the expertise and knowledge that LA HB experts can bring to the team.

29. An exciting opportunity has arisen for an LA secondee to join the Housing Policy Division (HPD). HPD is responsible for the maintenance and development of policy for HB and housing support within Universal Credit (UC). Our work involves developing, designing and implementing new policy initiatives as well as existing policies.

30. The LA secondee will work on a mixture of high profile policy areas, including mixed age couples policy, housing support in UC and supported accommodation.

31. It will involve liaising with internal and external delivery partners on cross cutting work, utilising their skills to improve guidance and drafting high quality replies to Parliamentary Questions and Freedom of Information requests, which will need to be replied to in a tight timeframe to ensure compliance with Parliamentary standards.

Personal requirements

32. Candidates should possess the following:

• good understanding of HB procedures and regulations
• good drafting and communication skills
• ability to build and maintain effective working relationships with LAs and other stakeholders
• ability to work with people at different levels in the organisation and to work as part of a team to achieve results
• ability to deliver work at pace and with successful, quantifiable outcomes

Further Information

33. The secondment is offered for an initial period of 6 months which will be extended by a further 6 months if all parties (the individual, their LA and DWP) are happy to do so. The post is offered on a full-time basis but we are prepared to offer some flexibility to secure the right candidate. The post will be based in one of our policy ‘hubs’ (Sheffield, Leeds, London). Neither travelling expenses nor a move at public expense can be considered.

34. If you are keen to undertake this role and are at SO1/SO2/PO1/PO2 (roughly equates to Civil Service Higher Executive Officer (HEO) grade with a salary around £31,208 to £38,405) please:

• check with your LA that you could be released; and then
• send your CV by email to [email protected] before the closing date on 30 September 2019

Updated Discretionary Housing Payment guidance manual

35. Please be aware, the Discretionary Housing Payments guidance manual which can be found on our HB pages on GOV.UK has been updated to reflect changes in relation to UC and what a Discretionary Housing Payment cannot cover, in section 2.

Publication of HB Speed of Processing statistics

36. We published HB Speed of Processing (SoP) statistics and associated data for the quarter 4 (Q4) period January to March 2019 on Wednesday 31 July 2019. Here are some key points:

New claims

• The average time taken to process new HB claims in Q4 of 2018 to 2019 was 19 calendar days, this is 3 days lower than it was in Q4 of 2017 to 2018.

• In Q4 there were 120,000 new HB claims. This represents a decrease of 33 thousand (21%) since the last quarter and a decrease of 110 thousand (49%) since Q4 of 2017 to 2018.

Changes of circumstances

• The average time taken to process changes of circumstances to HB claims for Q4 of 2018 to 2019 was 4 calendar days, this is the same as in Q4 of 2017 to 2018.

• For Q4 there were 4.6 million changes of circumstances to HB claims. This is an increase of 2.7 million (142%) since last quarter and a decrease of 1.5 million (24%) cases since Q4 of 2017 to 2018.

To note

• In Q4 of the financial year 2018 to 2019, 97% of HB claims processed were change of circumstances on existing claims and the remaining 3% were new HB claims.

• There are increases in the number of change of circumstances and decreases in processing time for these in Q4 each year. The average time taken to process change of circumstances tends to decrease in February and/or March. This may be due to the increase of resources to deal with bulk change of circumstances, and often uprating activity, at the end of the financial year.

• Q4 of 2018 to 2019 has the lowest average SoP for new claims that has been observed, however, with the change to the HB caseload composition following the completion of UC rollout, it may not be meaningful to compare this figure to previous years.

37. Read the Housing Benefit: statistics on speed of processing 2017 to 2018.

HB cases decided or awaiting decision by the Upper Tribunal

38. Decision Making and Appeals (DMA) Leeds is not aware of any HB cases that have been decided or are awaiting decision by the Upper Tribunal. Decisions of the Upper Tribunal (UT) are published on their website which can be found on GOV.UK.

39. If you have any queries about cases before the UT Judges or courts, please contact us by email at [email protected] or fax on 0113 232 4841.

New legislation

40. The following Statutory Instrument (SI) has been laid:

• 2018 No. 532 The Welfare Reform Act 2012 (Commencement No. 17, 19, 22, 23 and 24 and Transitional and Transitory

• Provisions (Modification) Order 2018, made on 9 May 2018

41. Copies of SIs can now be downloaded from legislation.gov.uk

What’s new on our HB pages on GOV.UK

42. The following items can be found on the website link shown:

Document Type	Subject
LAWD8/2019	Editorial Changes to the Apollo Register process Update: National Fraud Initiative Inappropriate calls to the Benefit Cap Enquiry Line New email address for Payment Deduction Programme revisions (Capita and Civica LAs only) LA engagement events Update: Transfer Your Files HB Decisions with the Upper Tribunal New Legislation What’s new on our HB pages on GOV.UK
U3/2019	Court of Appeal judgment: The Secretary of State for Work and Pensions -v- Hockley (1) and Nuneaton and Bedworth Borough Council (2)