Official Statistics

Use of Discretionary Housing Payments: financial year 2018 to 2019

Analysis of local authorities' use of Discretionary Housing Payment (DHP) funds, based on end-of-year monitoring and financial returns.

• From: Department for Work and Pensions
• Published: 11 July 2019
• Last updated: 14 August 2019 — See all updates

Applies to England and Wales

• Publication for Scotland

Documents

Use of Discretionary Housing Payments, analysis of end of year returns from local authorities: April 2018 to March 2019

Ref: ISBN 978-1-78659-167-8

PDF, 236 KB, 13 pages

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Data tables: Use of Discretionary Housing Payments, analysis of end of year returns from local authorities: April 2018 to March 2019

ODS, 191 KB

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Use of Discretionary Housing Payments statistics: background information and methodology

PDF, 499 KB, 10 pages

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Details

Since the publication of the statistical release on 11 July 2019, an issue has been corrected which meant some English local authorities were categorised as Welsh, and some Welsh local authorities were categorised as English. The correction has resulted in the breakdowns of DHP expenditure by country in tables 2 and 4 being updated.

On 14 August 2019, 2 further issues were corrected:

• in table 2 the figures in columns for ‘DHP allocation’ and ‘DHP spent including LA top up funding’ have been reversed - the columns showing percentages of DHP funding spent in the table are unaffected
• in the published tables, the column titles in the ‘Monitoring Returns’ tab showing the breakdown of local authority DHP allocations by welfare reform for 2018 to 2019 have been reordered with no effect on figures within the publication

This publication provides analysis of the use of DHPs.

DHPs are monetary awards that can be made by local authorities to people experiencing financial difficulty with housing costs who qualify for Housing Benefit or the housing costs element of Universal Credit.

This statistical release presents analysis of information submitted to the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) by local authorities, covering the financial year April 2018 to March 2019.

Local authorities provide details of their use of DHP funds to DWP twice a year. These are published for the first 6 months of the financial year and for the whole of the financial year.

We published statistics on the Use of Discretionary Housing Payments: April to September 2018 on 13 December 2018.

DHPs and Scotland

DHPs for Scotland were devolved from 1 April 2017, under the Scotland Act 2016 implementing the Smith Commission Agreement.

Published 11 July 2019
Last updated 14 August 2019 + show all updates

1. 14 August 2019

   Updated release and data tables. Information about the updates has been published on the page.

2. 22 July 2019

   Updated release and data tables following an issue with local authority categorisation.

3. 11 July 2019

   First published.