Universal Credit Staff Costs ‘Unsustainable’

City West Housing Trust carried out a pilot from July 2013 to March this year, to test the direct payment of benefit to tenants ahead of the wider roll-out of universal credit over the next three years. Results from the 14,600-home landlord’s nine-month project, under which 52 tenants received housing benefit direct, show an average rent collection rate of 99.18%. However, management costs, calculated using an estimation of staff time, ballooned during this period from £178.94 for a normal case to £754.88 for a direct-payment project case. This was because of increased expenditure, including home visits to tenants to collect rent and provide support. If this cost were extrapolated across all 2,000 City West tenants set to receive direct payments, the cost would be around £1.2m. This is higher than City West’s £1.1m budget to manage the payments of all 14,600 homes it manages. Read more on Inside Housing.