Guidance

LA Welfare Direct lite 12/2019

Updated 4 March 2024

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Contact

If you have queries about the:

Who should read

All Housing Benefit staff.

Action

For information.

Update: National Fraud Initiative action to take

1. The National Fraud Initiative (NFI) 2018 to 2019 matches were released to local authorities (LAs) and the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) in January 2019. As you know these matches are delivered every 2 years and aim to identify fraud and error in Housing Benefit (HB) only and related DWP benefits, using a range of data sources.

2. The matches relating to DWP administered benefits are only released to DWP; thereby significantly reducing the volume of matches that LAs need to action.

3. The HB only data held by NFI was refreshed in October 2019 and, at this point, they also refreshed the student loan data. This included information for the majority of students entering higher education in September 2019.

4. The matching of both HB and the student loan data has happened quickly and, as a result, NFI has (as from mid-December) already started releasing the additional HB only matches to LAs. They expect the release to complete by 30 January 2020.

5. To help support LAs in dealing with these matches, NFI have taken the usual steps to reduce false positives and filter the matches requiring review. This should assist LAs to identify cases that are for either compliance or investigation.

LA action to take

6. Once LAs receive these matches it is important that action is taken as quickly as possible to sift cases, especially between HB only to student loans, given that many students’ courses are likely to end in June 2020.

7. In the event that you need to contact DWP for further information regarding these matches, you should follow the normal business as usual procedures.

8. For any National Fraud Initiative queries you can contact nfiqueries@cabinetoffice.gov.uk

Disregard of payments: Grenfell Tower tragedy

9. Most of the people affected by the Grenfell Tower tragedy are being permanently rehoused within the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea (RBKC). However, it is feasible that some people affected by the tragedy might move to other LA areas and make a claim for HB (for example, a pensioner case).

Disregarded payments

10. In these cases, the following payments should be disregarded for HB:

  • all charitable payments paid to people affected by the tragedy

  • payments by the Grenfell Tower Residents’ Discretionary Fund

  • voluntary interim compensation payments made by RBKC (funded by their insurers) to replace personal possessions lost in the tragic fire.

11. All these payments are disregarded in the calculation of DWP income-related benefits and should also be disregarded in any HB calculations on an extra-statutory basis cover from HM Treasury, to the extent that they are not covered by existing disregard provisions.

12. In addition, all discretionary payments that are made to people affected by the fire under RBKC’s local welfare provision are to be disregarded.

13. There are already provisions which provide for personal injury compensation payments to be disregarded in certain circumstances. How they might affect benefit entitlement will be considered if such compensation payments are awarded in the future.

14. To clarify, compensation payments are not the same as payments from charities or payments from the RBKC’s welfare scheme which should be ignored when calculating HB. Any other capital a claimant may have should be treated in the normal way.

15. If you have a questions about the content of this article housing.benefitenquiries@dwp.gov.uk

Disregard of Payments: National Emergencies Trust

16. The charitable sector launched a new body, the National Emergencies Trust (NET) on 7 November 2019. NET has responsibility for creating a single, national fund for major domestic emergency events. More detail is can be found on the NET website.

17. The NET is a charity that will launch a public appeal in response to national disasters and emergencies. It will then coordinate the distribution of funds raised to victims and/or their families. It has been set up on the advice of the Charity Commission for England and Wales after lessons learned from the Grenfell tragedy and the Manchester and London terrorist attacks, which found there needed to be better coordination and distribution of fundraising, as well as better coordination of the overall initial charitable sector response.

18. NET’s current scope is England and Wales, however collaboration discussions with Scotland and Northern Ireland are underway.

19. We understand that the aim of any funding provided to beneficiaries from NET will not overlap with the aims of social security payments. The aim of the NET payments is to support those impacted at their time of greatest need, which the social security system is not necessarily set up to respond to, and any awards made will not duplicate state activity.

20. If you have a questions about the content of this article housing.benefitenquiries@dwp.gov.uk

Sharing of DWP customer data with wider LA services

21. Housing Delivery Division’s (HDD’s) Local Government Data Sharing Transformation team lead on future data sharing initiatives between DWP and local authorities (LAs).

22. More often, HDD write to you about matters related to HB. However, we’ve been looking at LAs’ wider services to see if the further sharing of our DWP customer data on those claimants/pensioners with disabilities and those recently bereaved could help reduce LA administration costs and get those people the help they need and rely on faster.

23. We have looked at a very broad range of wider LA services to ascertain those that might benefit most from the sharing of our data and identified an initial six services that we believe would benefit most from improved data shares. These are:

  • disabled people bus passes

  • disabled people home adaptations and aids

  • disabled people parking bays

  • disabled people taxi card

  • special educational needs transport

  • funeral expense payments

24. We are aware your authority may use alternative names for these services

25. We are hoping to work with a broad range of authorities in order to carry out:

  • user research – to work in conjunction with LA and DWP teams who deliver and administer the service to gain further insight and relevant information

  • journey mapping – to detail the end to end process of each service

  • quantification – to gain an understanding of the time and costs involved for the administration and delivery of the service

26. We would be very grateful if you could share this request with those responsible for delivering the above listed services within your authority and ask them to support us in the initial fact finding review.

27. If they are happy to help, we ask that they send their contact details to lgdata.sharingtransformation@dwp.gov.uk by Friday 10 January 2020.

28. We then plan to get in touch with them during week commencing 13 January 2020 to arrange visits and discuss the next steps.

29. In the meantime, if you have any further questions please feel free to email the team at the address given above.

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