social housing rent

femak

I recently enquired to my local Head start team why my rent was significantly higher than my neighbours. I assumed it was because my neighbour was on an older tenancy, she moved in around 2002 and I was offered the property in April 2019. The lady I spoke to agreed that it was probably because of this as she is on social housing rent whereas my rent comes under Affordable rent. She followed this up by having a look at people that had moved into similar properties into my area, ( two of which have moved into my street) and they are all paying £40 a week less than I am. She said that she would look into it but I have not heard anything back from her nor can I contact her. I have spoken to the rents department but they said they had no idea and that I should carry on liaising with the Head Start team, whom will not answer my calls or emails. Does anybody have any experience with this? Do I have any recourse?
Many thanks
F

deannagone

Hopefully this explains 'affordable rent', how it works, why its been implemented more and more in social housing.https://www.theguardian.com/housing-network/2014/feb/03/affordable-housing-meaning-rent-social-housing

Basically, if you signed up for a property at 'affordable housing' rent levels, I don't see how it can be changed. It might seem unfair to be charged much more, but the benefit to you is, when it was being bid on, less people could afford it so there were fewer bids than with 'normal' low rent social housing. There may even have been no bids because generally you have to be on higher than minimum wage to afford 'affordable' rents (which wlll be beyond most people having problems affording private rental and so on the housng register). I know when I was homeless, the rents for 'affordable housing' were so much higher than social housing rent, I just couldn't afford to bid on them no matter how much more chance I had of getting a successful bid with affordable housing compared to competing with the hundreds of bids on each social rent property.

I'm afraid the time to investigate this was when you were bidding on the house.  It will still be 85% of the local market rent value for similar properties in the area so should be cheaper than private rental costs.  But it will never be the same level as  social housing rent levels.

UPDATE: I then googled 'changes to affordable rent policy' and came up with this.  It will require more legal knowledge than I have, but may offer you some hope of a rent reduction if you can prove you now don't fit the 'affordable rent' criteria - maybe.  But you will also have to come across someone in the housing team that is prepared to pursue this.  Perhaps contacting a councillor or MP will help? https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/rent-standard/rent-standard-april-2020

HampshireH

@deannagone  is correct. Certain homes get allocated and registered as affordable or social and the time to avoid an affordable rent was when bidding 

The bidding system says whether it's affordable or social on the advert.

It's most unlikely any HA will change this. Regardless of who you get involved and how loud you shout.

Example there could be just 4 properties in the whole street that are "affordable rent" compared to social. Because they met the criteria at the time.

If you were all on the same type of tenancy and your rents were different that would be different 

At the end of the day you signed the tenancy agreeing to the terms of an affordable assured tenancy and not a social assured tenancy.