Housing benefit claimants locked out of private renting, warns Hackney CAB

Mapping the problems: Hackney CAB's crowdmap of housing benefit shortfalls and threatened evictions

We hit the phones at Hackney Citizens Advice Bureau for a mammoth mystery shopping exercise to find out how easy it is to find accommodation in Hackney if you’re claiming housing benefit.

We wanted to see how many private rental properties were available within the new housing benefit limits and to find out if landlords were willing to rent them out to housing benefit claimants.

So one Friday in June, five of us carried out a snapshot survey of all the properties listed on Gumtree and Rightmove to see what’s out there.

Limits to housing benefit have been set so that about 30% of properties should be affordable, but rates were frozen in April this year, and Hackney rents have continued to rise.

We looked at 1585 properties of varying sizes and postcodes in the borough (ignoring the eyewateringly expensive Olympic lets!), and found that only 142 were within housing benefit limits.

This means that just 9% of the properties were affordable to someone claiming housing benefit.

But what really shocked us was when we called round to see if landlords were willing to rent these properties to us as hypothetical housing benefit tenants.

We found just fourteen properties within the limited rates with landlords willing to rent to housing benefit claimants – that’s less than 1% of all the properties we looked at. People gave a whole bunch of reasons from saying they don’t work with the council, to just personal preference.

Breaking down the figures, we found that it’s even harder to find family-sized properties of two bedrooms or more. Just 3% of those were within housing benefit limits and 0.5% with landlords willing to rent to housing benefit tenants.

Looking at such a constrained market it would be hard to believe that housing benefit has pushed up private rents in Hackney.

We did find a few specialised services, from a website charging registration fees to find housing benefit rentals, to links advertising high-interest credit and a company which offered to lend deposits to tenants for a hefty non-returnable fee.

We felt very dejected as we took off our mystery shopping personas for the day, but it’s a daunting landscape for anyone who really needs to find accommodation in the borough.

If you need advice on housing benefit cuts or housing issues, you can talk confidentially to an adviser at:

Hackney Citizens Advice Bureau
300 Mare Street
Hackney
E8 1HE
Tel: 020 8525 6350

Information is also available on the Citizens Advice Bureau website.

Note: Rebecca Falcon and Catherine Dempsey work in the social policy team at Hackney CAB.

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Hackney CAB crowdmaps housing benefit shortfalls and threatened evictions