Response A1345088

Response to request for information

Reference

A1345088

Response date

15 April 2021

Request

I am writing to make a Freedom of Information request concerning your Council's expenditure on Discretionary Housing Payments (DHPs) for the 2019/20 financial year.

I am aware some information on DHPs is submitted to the Department for Work & Pensions in its analysis of End of Year returns from local authorities. This includes the total number of awards, DHP financial expenditure and Government contribution original allocation. These monitoring returns provide details of the purpose of the DHP award, such as to secure and move to alternative accommodation and rental costs, split by the welfare form for which households have been affected.

What is not included in this information is the amount and value of DHPs applied for which are not awarded, or if only partial amounts are given. I am requesting this information, as detailed in Table 1 below, and also request splits of this data by the age band of the claimant. If possible, please can the figures just for those where the claimant is aged between 16 and 30 be provided.

Separately, I am requesting information on your Council's use of rent guarantee schemes: these are typically used to help people facing homelessness by providing a written guarantee to the landlord to cover any unpaid rent/damage. The information I require is written below, but also in a Table 2:

• Total amount of rent guarantees issued in 2019/20
  • How many rent guarantees were issued to care leavers
  • Age bands of those issued rent guarantees

Response

We will not be able to answer your request without exceeding the appropriate limit. This is because we do not record this information separately and to extract the information it would mean going into each individual application which would exceed the cost of compliance.

Section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act makes provision for public authorities to refuse requests for information where the cost of dealing with them would exceed the appropriate limit, which for local authorities is set at £450. This represents the estimated cost of one person spending 2 working days in determining whether the authority holds the information, and locating, retrieving and extracting it. The appropriate limit is prescribed by regulation 3 of the Freedom of Information and Data Protection (appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulations 2004.