Cambridge City Council tenants could be owed thousands
The City Council has identified two historic errors in how it's set rent and service charges
Some council tenants in Cambridge could be owed thousands of pounds.
The City Council has identified two historic errors in how it's set rent and service charges, and is now looking to refund over £4.3 million pounds in total.
The local authority says it's reviewing over 23,000 tenancies from the last 20 years.
The first error related to the authority not correctly applying a one-per cent rent reduction under The Welfare Reform and Work Act 2016 to its affordable rented homes.
The second error related to how rent and service charges were displayed on rent accounts since the introduction of rent restructuring from April 2002 and the subsequent separation out of the service charges from April 2004.
The council has confirmed it had set up a project team to manage the “significant workload” and said it is in the process of hiring a new member of staff to oversee the project.
At a housing scrutiny committee meeting this week (18/6) officers said all current council tenants who had been impacted have now been contacted and all the rents had now been corrected.
They said this meant the city council had now “closed the window” on the error period and could move on to working towards refunding the overpayments.
However, officers explained there are some complications that they are trying to overcome, including agreeing with the Department for Work and Pensions on how any overpayment of Universal Credit should be refunded.
Officers also explained that the city council does not hold the details of all of those who may have been impacted by the rent error, due to a GDPR process that saw former tenants’ details wiped from the system after six years.
Officers said they will be able to calculate how much was overpaid in these cases based on the property they were living in, but said they do not know who the individual tenant was.
They explained that eventually the city council will have to ask anybody who was a tenant in the past who thinks may have been impacted by the rent error to get in touch.
They said if the person can provide sufficient information to confirm they lived in the property then the city council would be able to consider making the refund.
Officers said this will have to be considered on a case by case basis.
The city council is currently hoping to begin making the first refunds later this year.