Agenda item

Objective: To provide the Committee with an overview of the Counter Fraud Enforcement Unit’s work on housing and tenancy fraud over the previous year.

The Assistant Director, Counter Fraud and Enforcement Unit addressed the committee and highlighted the following:

-       The Counter Fraud and Enforcement Unit support the housing services team in relation to housing and tenancy fraud activities. Whilst the Unit will continue to carry out investigation cases on behalf of the council, in the future the aim is for verification activities to be carried out by the housing team as they are now directly employed by the council. This will allow the Unit to increase focus on enforcement activities, specific fraud cases, and prosecution in the right circumstances to act as a deterrent. There may also be increased communication with tenants to raise awareness.

-       The Unit manage the National Fraud Initiative matches that relate to housing anomalies on behalf of the council.

-       They also carry out a housing waiting list review to consider emergency, gold and silver bands. Errors here may not necessarily relate to fraud and may relate to changes in applicant’s circumstances. This provides loss avoidance as it reduces risk of the council putting people into temporary accommodation unnecessarily. It was noted that the figure of household applications relating to the council at 3.19 of the report, should read 2,914 instead of 1,811.

-       Focus for the coming year will be on raising fraud awareness with staff, management, residents, tenants and members. This will include a campaign with tenants to ensure they know how to refer matters, and what types of things should be referred.

The committee’s discussion raised the following points:

-       It would be helpful to include a section on housing and tenancy fraud in the revised Tenant Handbook, to explain what it is and how to report it.

-       When errors are identified on the housing waiting list these are reported back to the housing team to verify through an application review. Fraud investigations are not pursued in situations arising out of genuine errors or where tenants have not created the problem. Where there is obvious fraud, the Unit would open an investigation and a different investigator would progress that in the correct manner.

-       The move to the housing team carrying out verification builds on skills they already have and activities they have already been undertaking. They have already been referring things to the Unit and through the previous work with CBH there are strong relationships between the organisations. A quarterly enforcement meeting has been set up with the different areas of the housing team to discuss how to best mitigate errors within their areas, including supporting delivery of debt recovery.

-       Verification of housing applications includes review of whether applications are in the correct band, which can include applicants being moved to a higher band. It will include consideration of financial activity, such as disability benefits, to verify information included within the application. Discrepancies will then be followed up by the housing team with the applicants.

-       Benchmarking information will be provided to committee members to show how the figures compare to other councils across the county.

-       Sometimes errors are due to changing circumstances where applicants may have forgotten to update their information. Application is a two-stage process of verification before offers are made as it will be reviewed by both housing options for banding, and then is separately reviewed by the lettings team.

-       It was suggested that future reports show separate figures for situations where there are errors, positive moves between bands, and those with reasonable cause to suspect fraud.