Housing Element UC - wrong charges?

Furzeguy

My wife and I are a mixed age couple, I am a pensioner, she is not, and we live in sheltered housing. Our rent is mostly paid by universal credit with just a small amount for us to pay ourselves as our combined income just exceeds our universal credit personal amounts.

A few weeks ago we had notification from our housing association of the new rate of rent and service charges to apply from 3rd April. 

The rent had gone up by just over £5 a week which is what we expected, but the service charges have DROPPED by around £13 a week and after looking at the statement from HA it appeared to be an error as some things were not charged this year and other things were much less. 

Other tenants in the block and our warden also felt it was wrong and she referred the matter to head office, and I personally contacted HA as well and I had a reply back by email that they were looking into it and would advise me if it was correct or wrong. 

This was 2 weeks ago and the new rent has now kicked in.

I have had to update my universal credit claim to reflect the new amounts this morning. My worry is if the HA realize they have made a mistake and want to increase the service charges by £13 or so are they allowed to do that because they can only increase the rent once a year and they have already done that and should have checked that the figures were correct. 

 and B ...  if they do try and charge extra will I be able to alter my UC claim to reflect that and will UC pay the extra going forward and backdate it to 3 April which is what the HA would want.

It seems extremely unfair if I were made to pay money for someone else's mistake, a mistake pointed out to them, and money which indeed we cannot afford.

I'm sure the knowledgeable people on this form will be able to help out. Sorry for this being so long.

huckster

Dealt with large volumes of Housing including Housing Associations.

It is not unusual for Housing Associations to reduce services charge by quite a lot in April. There can be many reasons for this and the Housing Association will have produced a detailed account of how the service charge has been calculated.

If there has been a mistake, you would just report the Housing again on your UC claim and as part of the normal process, the UC system will check with the Housing Association. And once confirmed the Housing on claim would be adjusted.

Newcad

It's almost certainly not a mistake that needs to be corrected.
It has been done like that deliberately, it's common, and my HA has done the same.

It's a bit of financial shuffling by the Housing Associations accounts department.

Social Housing has had 'rent' rises capped at a maximum of 7% this year.
Many have put the actual rent amount up by slightly over that 7%, and then reduced the service charges so that what you actually pay overall has only gone up by 7%. (But see the PS below).

UC Housing Element includes both the actual rent and most* Service Charges for a Social Housing tenancy so pays both.
*Service Charges for things like your water charges, or for communal heating charges, are bills so are not included in UC-HE. (UC-HE is for housing costs, it doesn't pay peoples water or gas/electricity bills for them).

If the HA were now to say it was an error and put the services charges up you just tell UC who will put the Housing Element up to suit.
If they were to backdate the services charges you just tell UC who will backpay the respective HE.

PS. There is no cap on service charges, they could be increased by more than 7% this year, and I do know of some that have increased a lot more.