x
By using this website, you agree to our use of cookies to enhance your experience.
Written by Emma Lunn

A trade union wants the Information Commissioners Office to instruct councils to reveal the names of the 20 individual landlords who between them have been paid over £14m in housing benefits in the 2012-13 financial year.

The call comes after a request by the GMB union to 380 local authorities across the country; most returns from councils have specified sums but have removed names of the recipients.

Now the union’s case for the landlords to be named has been taken up by Andrew Pakes, Labour & Co-operative Parliamentary Candidate for Milton Keynes South, who says for the sake of transparency in the use of public money, the councils should name names.

So far it is believed that councils have told the GMB that £138.5m of public money has been paid in the year in question to individual landlords.

The delay in naming the individuals – if they are ever named at all – may be down to the ICO seeking to distinguish between personal and professional business; at least some of the landlords receiving housing benefit may not be full-time landlords, so may not be regarded as being professional business landlords.

Paying housing benefits to meet housing costs for rented accommodation for tenants on low incomes dates back to the 1980s but the cost has now ballooned to £23 billion per year. While over the past 30 years some £411 billion of taxpayer’s funds have been spent on housing benefit it is not clear in every case who the ultimate recipients are.

For 30% of tenants entitled to housing benefit the cash is paid direct to landlords.

To establish the identity of these landlords GMB and Daily Mirror carried out research at the Land Registry to establish the beneficial owners of properties and Freedom of Information requests were made to councils to establish the amounts paid to them.

Some 69 councils refused to disclose any information – so there could be high paid housing benefit landlords who escape the paper’s “name and shame” campaign.


 

Comments

  • icon

    Some of these so called individual landlords receiving millions of pounds are actually letting agents. Both Lambeth and Wandsworth council published a list of 'individuals' receiving the most housing benefits rent payments and in both councils the top 3 places were all letting agents. Is the quest for landlords details to go on a witch hunt? please union members publish the list of the top hundred union leaders living of members subscriptions?

    www.rentdirectuk.co.uk

    • 23 April 2014 15:32 PM
  • icon

    Could not have put it better myself Jamie, good post

    • 18 April 2014 10:00 AM
  • icon

    A union! Which one? Wants the identity of landlords receiving payment for letting properties! (When did this become an issue or a crime?) A union and some Labour people (whom?) want transparency re the use of public funds!! What?? Ha ha ha pots and kettles. Lipstick on a pig and double standards. Receiving public money as rent is not yet a crime! But our wee commie sympathisers are hard at it trying to make it a crime to ask for money to let a property as everything should be free for the vulnerable, (every tenant) really? Another attack on Landlords for daring to make a living and provide a service that disgusts those who would be the ruling classes, telling us what to do at every step. bring it on UKIP we need you to stop this idiocy and these shameful attacks on people and groups for political popularism. Let's have an enquiry into the utter waste of public funds by Labour over just their last 13 years in power and into all unions and their financial shenanigans, especially their leaderships use of funds. What utter balderdash and double standards

    • 17 April 2014 13:30 PM
MovePal MovePal MovePal