Housing costs under Universal Credit

Yamor

Housing_Benefit_Officer wrote: »

As far as I am aware the Housing Cost element will be identified and disregarded for LCTS it would be bonkers to include the payment as income.

That could get fairly complicated for someone not receiving the full amount of universal credit. Would it be calculated pro-rata?

However, looking again at the default council tax reduction scheme, it seems what they're doing is that when a person has an award of UC his applicable amount will change to simply be the maximum award the person could have received before the taper.
In other words, the applicable amount will include an amount for housing costs. So they've taken care of the problem the opposite way to how it's been done till now. (Until now, the applicable amount did not include an amount for housing costs, but housing benefit wasn't counted as income. Under UC, the applicable amount will include an amount for housing costs, so the housing costs element of UC will count as income.)