Just 31% of tenants maintained the exact amount of their rent payments during the pilot run by Sheffield Hallam University.
Under Universal Credit, which is being rolled out this month completing in June 2018, six benefit payments are combined into one monthly sum with the majority of social landlords no longer receiving tenants’ benefit for housing directly.
Housing Association Circle, which ran the HB2U pilot in Broadland District Council and published the report, paid 349 tenants their housing benefit directly, instead of to their landlord. The results showed for the 349 tenants, rent arrears increased to 2.5% – 2.1 percentage points higher than for tenants that were not on the pilot scheme.
The percentage of tenants in arrears grew from 21.5% to 37.8%, and the average value of arrears increased from £162.66 to £334.40 per tenant.
The study also found it was impossible to predict which tenants would fall into arrears because lapsed payments resulted from unpredictable events, like changes to household circumstances.
Circle Housing chief executive Mark Rogers has called for the government to pay tenants benefit for housing costs to landlords for the first three months of their Universal Credit to allow time to give tenants support and bed in the scheme.
Under the HB2U scheme featured in the pilot, tenants were given more support than the government’s ‘direct payment demonstration’ projects and the 349 tenants selected were judged to be ‘suitable for direct payments’ and not eligible for an Alternative Payment Arrangement (APA) where the payment is switched back to the landlord.
Inside Housing magazine revealed on Monday the Department for Work and Pensions has pledged to improve its Universal Credit procedures following concerns from social landlords that they are frequently not informed that their tenants are claiming the benefit.
More than 225,000 households were claiming Universal Credit in March, according to the latest government statistics, with eight million people expected to be claiming the benefit by 2021.
