Cambridge City council outlines plans to reimburse overcharged tenants
The Regulator of Social Housing published a regulatory judgement in June 2024, highlighting serious failings in Cambridge CC's delivery of the Rent Standard outcomes
Cambridge City Council (Cambridge CC) has outlined its plans to reimburse tenants who were overcharged due to historical rent-setting errors. The council say they identified these issues in late 2023 and 'promptly referred itself' to the Regulator of Social Housing.
The council has since corrected its rent calculations from April 2024 and informed affected tenants of the errors.
The issue dates back to policies introduced in 2004 and 2016.
The council failed to apply a required 1% rent reduction between 2016/17 and 2019/20 on about 300 affordable rent properties. Additionally, a rent policy from 2004 erroneously de-pooled service charges for gas and lift maintenance from rents, resulting in overcharges.
The Regulator of Social Housing published a regulatory judgement in June 2024, highlighting serious failings in Cambridge CC's delivery of the Rent Standard outcomes. The judgement noted that about half of the council's tenants were overcharged due to these errors, with an estimated ÂŁ1m required for refunds related to the rent reduction issue and ÂŁ3.2m related to service charges.
Reimbursement plans
Cambridge CC plans to work with the Department for Work and Pensions to determine how much of tenants’ rents were covered by Universal Credit or Housing Benefit.
Any refunds will consider tenants’ accounts in arrears, reducing the refund amount by the amount owed.
The council will start processing refunds in a few months and will contact affected tenants to request payment details, ensuring they will not cold call or ask for any payments in return for refunds.
Cllr Gerri Bird, Executive Councillor for Housing, said, “Our intention has always been to make what tenants pay transparent and to set rents as low as possible. When we created the Affordable Rents policy, we could have set rents higher than we did without breaching government guidance, but because of misinterpreting the guidance we have unfortunately overcharged some tenants. We are really sorry and we’re working to put this right as soon as we can. We really appreciate tenants’ patience with us while we work through this."
“I’ve seen some reports that tenants could receive thousands of pounds, and while a small number may receive refunds of that amount, the majority won’t. The most common error relates to Service Charges, which are approximately £2 per week, so any refund owed as a result of this error would only be in the thousands if a tenancy had been in place for 20+ years.”