Summary: Ms X complained about the Council’s delay in processing her appeal against its decision to cancel Housing Benefit. The Council was at fault and this caused injustice to Ms X. The Council has agreed to provide a suitable remedy so we have completed our investigation.

The complaint

1. Ms X complained that the Council took far too long to deal with her request for a reconsideration of its decision to cancel her Housing Benefit. There was then a further delay before it forwarded her appeal to the First Tier Tribunal.
2. Ms X says the delay caused her significant worry and distress. Her rent arrears increased substantially in this period and her landlord applied to the Court for a possession order.

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The Ombudsman’s role and powers

3. We investigate complaints about ‘maladministration’ and ‘service failure’. In this statement, I have used the word fault to refer to these. We must also consider whether any fault has had an adverse impact on the person making the complaint. I refer to this as ‘injustice’. If there has been fault which has caused an injustice, we may suggest a remedy. (Local Government Act 1974, sections 26(1) and 26A(1), as amended)
4. We do not decide whether a person is entitled to Housing Benefit. If someone disagrees with a council’s decision on a claim, we expect them to appeal to the independent tribunal - the Social Entitlement Chamber of the First Tier Tribunal. However, we do investigate complaints about delays by councils in processing Housing Benefit appeals.
5. If we are satisfied with a council’s actions or proposed actions, we can complete our investigation and issue a decision statement. (Local Government Act 1974, section 30(1B) and 34H(i), as amended)

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How I considered this complaint

6. I considered Ms X’s complaint and all the information she sent me. I considered relevant Housing Benefit records and the Council’s correspondence with Ms X about her appeal and complaint.
7. Ms X and the Council had an opportunity to comment on my draft decision. I considered their comments before making a final decision.

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What I found

8. Housing Benefit helps people on low incomes to pay their rent. It is a means-tested benefit which takes account of capital and income.
9. Housing Benefit regulations allow councils to ask a claimant to provide any evidence or certificates they reasonably need to decide someone’s entitlement to benefit. Councils must give claimants one month to provide the requested information, or longer where it is reasonable to do so.
10. Councils must issue a decision about Housing Benefit in writing. The decision notice must advise claimants of their rights to ask for more information (a statement of reasons) and their right to ask for a reconsideration or an appeal.
11. If the claimant disputes the decision, they should do this within one month of the date of the decision.

Housing Benefit appeals

12. Government guidance refers to ‘challenges’ to decisions which include both requests for reconsideration and appeals. Where someone expresses general dissatisfaction with a decision, but does not say whether they want a reconsideration or an appeal, the council must decide how to treat that correspondence.
13. If a claimant appeals a housing benefit decision the council will reconsider it before passing it to the First-Tier Tribunal (‘the Tribunal’). If a decision on appeal remains unchanged the council must pass the matter to the Tribunal “as soon as reasonably practicable” without the claimant needing to submit a new appeal. (Rule 24(1A) of The Tribunal Procedure (First-Tier Tribunal) (Social Entitlement Chamber) Rules 2008)
14. If the claimant asks the council to reconsider, it must send a new notice with its decision following its reconsideration. Whether it changes its decision or not, it must tell the claimant they have a fresh right of appeal within one month to the First Tier Tribunal.
15. If a claimant remains unhappy after a reconsideration, they can ask the council to pass their appeal to the Tribunal. Claimants must send their appeal to the council within one month and the council will refer the appeal to the Tribunal. (The Tribunal Procedure (First-Tier Tribunal) (Social Entitlement Chamber) Rules 2008)
16. The Regulations do not say how long councils should take to deal with housing benefit appeals. But they must do so as soon as is reasonably practicable.
17. In January 2020 we published a Focus Report on housing benefit. Our principles of good administrative practice encourage councils to make timely decisions and proactively explain the reasons for any delays. We consider councils should aim to allocate appropriate personnel and resources to manage appeal requests, and aim to consider them, or pass them on to the tribunal, within four weeks.

Housing Benefit

18. Ms X is a Housing Association tenant. Her landlord had served a Notice of Seeking Possession (NOSP) due to rent arrears before the Council suspended and later cancelled her Housing Benefit claim. At the point when the NOSP was served, Ms X’s owed just over £500.
19. On 23 August 2019 an officer in the Benefits Service wrote to ask Ms X to provide information within 14 days. It asked whether her partner lived with her and, if he did not, to provide details of his address. The letter said benefit would be suspended until she provided this information. Ms X says she did not receive this letter so she was not aware of this request.
20. On 25 September 2019 sent Ms X a benefit decision notice informing her that the claim had been cancelled because she had not supplied the requested information. It gave no further details. The notice explained her right to request a written statement of reasons, to ask for a reconsideration of the decision, or to appeal. Ms X received this letter on 1 October.

Ms X challenges the decision

21. There has been extensive correspondence between Ms X, advice agencies and the Benefits Service since September 2019. In this section of the statement I summarise key events but I do not refer to every single contact and communication.
22. Ms X contacted the Benefits Service on 30 September 2019 before she had received the benefit decision notice. Her landlord had informed her that Housing Benefit had stopped. She made a complaint to the Council. She asked for her benefit to be reinstated and backdated. It is clear from Ms X’s complaint that she wanted to challenge the decision to cancel her benefit. But it was not clear whether she was requesting an appeal or a reconsideration.
23. On 11 October a senior benefit officer replied to Ms X’s complaint. She said it would be treated as an appeal against the decision to cancel benefit. She referred it to the Appeals & Submission team.
24. One week later Ms X asked the Benefits Service for a written explanation of the decision and a review because she believed the decision to cancel benefit was wrong. The Council replied on 24 October. It said the decision to suspend benefit had been based on information supplied by the Department for Work & Pensions (DWP) following a telephone interview with Ms X in August. It summarised the information from the DWP interview and said Ms X had refused to give details of her partner’s address when asked to do so.
25. Ms X sent further emails to the Benefits Service in November 2019. She disputed the decision to cancel benefit. She said it was based on false allegations made to the DWP. She asked the Council to treat this as a complaint. She said she had not been properly informed of the reasons for the decision and her appeal rights. She told the Benefits Service her rent arrears had reached £1,300 and she was at risk of losing her home.
26. On 21 November a senior benefit officer wrote to Ms X. He said he had reviewed the claim and all the records. He would not reinstate the claim. The letter did not explain Ms X’s appeal rights.
27. Ms X continued to challenge the decision. On 12 December 2019 a benefits officer asked Ms X to provide the information requested in the 24 October letter. However that letter had not asked Ms X to provide further information.

28. On 6 January 2020 the Acting Chief Executive replied to further correspondence Ms X sent in mid-November. He said the Assistant Director of the Benefits Service had investigated her concerns. The Benefit Service would review the claim if Ms X provided specified information within the next ten working days. She should state whether her partner lived with her or, alternatively, provide his address. He also made a new request for information. He asked Ms X to explain how she paid for her children’s education. He said the Benefit Service would look at the decision to cancel the claim once she had provided this information. If she did not provide it, the decision to cancel the claim would stand. If she was dissatisfied after the claim had been reconsidered, she could appeal to the Tribunal within one month.

29. On 7 January a welfare rights adviser from a community advice centre wrote to the Benefits Service on Ms X’s behalf. He enclosed Ms X’s signed authorisation. He said Ms X now wished to appeal against the Council’s decision to cancel her benefit. He said the Council’s failure to deal promptly with her September 2019 request for reconsideration had put her tenancy at risk. He said there was no other adult living at her address and there had been no change in her circumstances that justified cancelling her benefit.

30. The Council replied to the welfare rights adviser on 22 January. It referred to a letter sent to Ms X on 17 January. In its subsequent appeal submission to the First Tier Tribunal, the Council acknowledged this was an error. The Council also accepted that this appeal request was not acted on.

31. On 30 January Ms X replied to the Council’s 6 January request for information about her children’s school and explained how she funded their education. She attached evidence of some payments made to the school.
32. On 12 February an officer in the Benefits Service told Ms X this evidence was not satisfactory. He asked to see unredacted bank statements. He also asked Ms X for a letter from her children’s school confirming the purpose of these payments. Ms X sent further evidence in late February.
33. On 22 April 2020 Ms X sent the Council a Housing Benefit appeal form.
34. On 29 April a senior benefits officer sent an email to Ms X asking her to explain some transfers between two bank accounts. Ms X replied the following day. She said she had provided all the evidence requested by the Council and she could not provide any further information. She said she had no undeclared sources of income or capital.
35. On 13 May 2020 the Council completed its reconsideration of Ms X’s appeal. It informed her that it upheld the decision to cancel her claim. It said it had wrongly treated her 30 September 2019 complaint as an appeal. Now that it had completed its reconsideration, Ms X could appeal within one month. Ms X replied on the same day. She referred to the appeal she had already made on 23 April and asked the Council to forward it to the Tribunal without further delay.
36. In June 2020 Ms X wrote to a local Councillor and her MP to seek their assistance. She also contacted local advice agencies who wrote to the Council on her behalf in July.
37. On 16 July 2020 the Council referred Ms X’s appeal to the Tribunal Service. It sent her a copy of its appeal submissions on the same day. In the appeal pack the date of Ms X’s appeal is recorded as 14 January 2020.
38. Overall it took just short of ten months for the Council to complete its reconsideration of the September 2019 decision and send Ms X’s appeal to the Tribunal.

The Council’s response to our enquiries

39. When it replied to our enquiries, the Council acknowledged some fault in the way it had handled Ms X’s request. In particular:
• it wrongly treated her 30 September 2019 complaint as an appeal when it should have dealt with it as a request for reconsideration of the decision to cancel her claim;
• instead of carrying out a formal reconsideration, and then advising Ms X of her right of appeal, it asked her for information to enable her claim to be put back into payment. Although it was entitled to request this information, the letters should have informed her of her appeal rights.
• there was undue delay from the time she made the complaint on 30 September 2019 to issuing the reconsideration letter.

Events following Ms X’s complaint

40. This investigation examines what happened between September 2019 and July 2020 when Ms X made this complaint to us.
41. However it is relevant to consider the outcome of Ms X’s appeal to the First Tier Tribunal when we assess the injustice caused by the Council’s delay in handling the reconsideration and appeal.
42. The Tribunal set aside the Council’s decision to cancel the claim and directed it to reinstate it. In the decision notice, the judge identified several deficiencies in the notices the Council sent Ms X when it requested information. They did not include prescribed information and did not give the statutory period of one month for her to respond. The May 2020 reconsideration decision notice was also defective and Ms X had not been properly advised of her appeal rights.
43. By November 2020 Ms X’s rent arrears were more than £7,000. Ms X told me two dates for Court hearings in February and March 2020 were adjourned because of the moratorium on evictions during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Analysis

44. Ms X first contacted the Benefits Service on 30 September 2019 to challenge the decision to cancel her Housing Benefit claim. The Council wrongly treated this as an appeal rather than a request for a reconsideration. This error seems to have contributed to the initial delay.
45. Ms X chased up a response several times in the following months and an advice agency contacted the Council in January 2020. No substantive action was taken until January 2020. The email sent to Ms X on 6 January 2020 was a response to her complaint. She had to wait until 13 May 2020 for the outcome of the reconsideration. The Benefits Service had asked Ms X to provide further information in the intervening period but that does not excuse this delay. The Ombudsman would consider it reasonable for the Council to have completed the reconsideration within four weeks (by late October 2019). If the Council did not consider Ms X had provided sufficient information to allow it to reinstate benefit, it should have notified her that it would not revise the September 2019 decision and informed her about appeal rights.
46. Ms X was frustrated by the Council’s delay in dealing with her September 2019 request so she instructed the advice agency to request an appeal in January 2020. This request superseded her earlier request for a reconsideration. The Council should therefore have treated it as an appeal. In its later submission to the Tribunal the Council cited 14 January 2020 as the date on which Ms X appealed.
47. When Ms X was eventually notified of the outcome of the reconsideration in May 2020, she confirmed she wished to appeal on the same day. It then took a further two months for the Council to send her case to the Tribunal. This further delay was also fault.
48. Applying the timescale in paragraph 16, we would consider it reasonable to expect the Council to have completed the reconsideration within four weeks and then taken a further four weeks to deal with the appeal request. That would have been eight weeks in total. However the Council took almost ten months. So the unreasonable delay is eight months.
49. I have considered the impact this lengthy delay had on Ms X. It clearly caused her significant distress and worry. Housing Benefit payments stopped in August 2019 and her rent arrears then escalated. The Housing Association had already served a NOSP for pre-existing arrears and it started possession proceedings when the arrears increased. Ms X genuinely feared she may lose her home and she lived with this worry for several months. Fortunately the ban on evictions due to the COVID-19 pandemic prevented this happening.
50. Ms X was also put to significant time and trouble in pursuing her complaint with the Council and seeking assistance from a Councillor, her MP and advice agencies to try to get it resolved.

Agreed action

51. Within one month the Council will:
• Apologise in writing to Ms X;
• Pay £500 for her distress;
• Pay £200 for her time and trouble in pursuing the complaint over a prolonged period;
• Arrange a briefing for staff in the Benefits Service who handle requests for Housing Benefit reconsiderations and appeals to make them aware of the findings of the First Tier Tribunal and the faults we have identified.

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Final decision

52. I have completed the investigation and found the Council’s fault caused injustice to Ms X. The Council has agreed to provide a suitable remedy.

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Investigator's decision on behalf of the Ombudsman