[KF] A new Audit Commission initiative will target cheats who are keeping homeless and needy families out of scarce social housing. The public spending watchdog has extending the reach of its National Fraud Initiative (NFI) to help detect fraudsters who illegally occupy or sublet multiple council and housing association homes.
NFI is the programme that since 1996 has been matching data held by councils, fire and police authorities and the Government to prevent and detect fraud. It is estimated £500 million of fraud and overpayments have been identified by the initiative to date. Data matching is strictly controlled to ensure compliance with data protection and human rights legislation.
The NFI has attracted international praise and attention. Now, housing associations are to be encouraged to share the benefits of the NFI. One association's records will be cross-checked with data from another as well as local authority lists, to expose potential tenancy fraud.
The aim is to identify tenants who are housed in social dwellings, but who fail entitlement rules because they have tenancies elsewhere. The Audit Commission will examine data through a secure on-line website. The resulting matches will be released in the autumn.
Steve Bundred, Chief Executive of the Audit Commission said:
"For every illegal tenancy there is a homeless tenant or family who stands to lose out. This is because housing that should have been theirs is occupied illegally by some one else holding two or more tenancies. It also represents a waste of taxpayers' money.
"We are delighted to be working with government and local authorities on this initiative to root out the fraudsters who exploit the social housing system for personal gain. Extending our National Fraud initiative will help to prevent this type of fraud occurring in the future."
John Healey, Minister of State for Housing and Planning, said:
"There is no place for those who want to profit from their tenancies. Tenancy cheats deny homes to thousands of people who really need them.
"That's why I am announcing a coordinated national crackdown on cheats this autumn. There will be a nationwide data sweep to identify possible fraudsters and new practical advice on how best to combat them. Central and local government will be working together with housing associations to beat the cheats so these homes go to those who really need them."
War on Housing Cheats
1st Touch / Herefordshire Housing
Herefordshire Housing Ltd has chosen enterprise-mobile, workforce management software from 1st Touch to support the management of its responsive repairs service and trades colleagues across five thousand homes in the county.
1st Touch, which integrates fully with Herefordshire Housing's existing Orchard Housing Management system, replaces the previous paper based job system by sending electronic job tickets directly to 25 internal trade colleague's PDAs.
This simultaneously reduces dead time, monitors real time job performance and reduces the wasted time associated with trade colleagues returning to base to hand in completed job tickets and collect paperwork.
The electronic solution provides access online to a wealth of customer and property information.
The system also has location mapping functionality, which allows management to see which trades colleagues are closest to jobs, allowing them to speed up response times even more.
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Kiew Stoke / Stafford and Rural Homes
Housing maintenance firm Kier Stoke signed a new contract to carry out repairs on thousands of homes in Stafford. The joint venture company, which was formed when Kier took over Stoke-on-Trent City Council's housing maintenance operation in February last year, is now working with Stafford and Rural Homes.
Kier Stoke is already responsible for looking after almost 19,500 council houses in Stoke-on-Trent, as well as about 500 public buildings in the City. The parent company, Kier Group, won a £400 million contract to provide housing maintenance services for the City Council for 10 years - with an option to extend the arrangement to 15 years.
The joint venture company transferred about 500 council staff when it was set up, of which about 360 are now directly employed by Kier.
The RSL Staffordshire and Rural Homes was set up to manage Stafford Borough Council's 5,600 council homes in 2006, after tenants voted in favour of a stock transfer the previous year.
Kier Stoke's contact centre manager, Lee Owen, said that a lot of work was also going into improving the way that customer calls are handled. He said:
"We are the first point of contact for a huge range of council services now, and we had an increase of 220,000 calls in the last year.
We have seen a huge growth in the contact centre itself and we have now got 100 staff in place, making us the largest contact centre in the area."