Healey plans crackdown on tenancy cheats

4 Dec 09
Members of the public are being offered £500 to tip off local authorities about tenants who unlawfully sublet their homes to other households
By Neil Merrick

3 December 2009

Members of the public are being offered £500 to tip off local authorities about tenants who unlawfully sublet their homes to other households.

A total of 147 councils will receive £4m for anti-fraud initiatives designed to catch ‘tenancy cheats’. People whose information leads to the recovery of the first 1,000 council or housing association properties will be given rewards.

Announcing the scheme on November 30, housing minister John Healey said tip-offs from neighbours were critical in half of all cases where homes were recovered from fraudsters.

‘We can’t allow cheats to hang on to the tenancies of council houses they don’t need and don’t live in,’ he said. ‘I want people to feel the system for housing families who need homes is fairer.’

The Audit Commission estimated that 50,000 social homes in England could be unlawfully acquired or sublet. In inner cities, the figure might be as high as 1 in 20. It costs about £3,000 to recover such a property, compared with £100,000 to build a new home.

The commission’s National Fraud Initiative was extended to social housing in August, with landlords urged to cross-check their records. Healey said data sweeps by the commission had resulted in about 8,000 leads.

The anti-fraud drive is based on Chartered Institute of Housing guidance, although this does not specifically recommend rewards. Joanne Kent-Smith, senior policy officer at the CIH, said she was surprised by the sums being offered and said there was no evidence that incentives increase reporting by the public.

The institute suggested regular tenancy visits, or audits, to detect abuse. ‘There is a role for landlords to increase the amount of detective work they do themselves,’ she said.

Shadow housing minister Grant Shapps criticised the government for encouraging people to ‘spy on their neighbours’ bedrooms’ and said tenancy fraud was better tackled through data matching.

‘Councils across the country are already tackling fraud in an unobtrusive manner without recruiting citizens into a modern day Stasi,’ he said.

According to ministers, 80% of households living in unlawfully sub-let homes do not qualify for social housing.

Tenants who sublet, meanwhile, stand to lose their tenancy and any future right to social housing.

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