Independent Revenues and Benefits Discussion Group, 9 November 2026
A household can miss out on Pension Credit and fall behind on its council tax. A family can lose a private tenancy because its housing support no longer covers the rent, leaving the council to pay for temporary accommodation. At Monday’s discussion, Malcolm Gardner brought those two problems together by asking what happens to household debt, council tax collection and demand for local services when people miss out on income or cannot find a home they can afford.
Why people miss out on benefits
Malcolm opened with Department for Work and Pensions figures showing that 62% of eligible households claimed Pension Credit and 83% claimed pensioner Housing Benefit. What explained the gap? Was it stigma, the difficulty of applying or a belief that there was little point?
Gareth Morgan put awareness first. In his reading of the research, the strongest barriers were that people did not know a benefit existed, assumed they would not qualify or worried that claiming might jeopardise help they already received. Stigma played a part, he said, but a much smaller one. Gareth had mapped Pension Credit take-up in Wales and noticed how closely it tracked the availability of benefits advice and outreach. He was careful about what the comparison could establish, but it reinforced his case for telling people what they may qualify for and helping them claim it.
Rachael Walker gave more weight to stigma and complexity. She also drew attention to people who were already claiming but receiving less than they were entitled to. For someone expecting only a few pounds a week, she said, the time and effort involved in dealing with the DWP or the council could make a claim feel barely worthwhile. Gareth pointed out that a small award can open the door to other help, such as social tariffs or support with energy bills. The weekly payment may tell a household very little about what the claim is worth overall.
Bob Wagstaff asked how much of the unclaimed money sat behind the headline caseload figures. Gareth said the figures showed a higher share of total entitlement by value being claimed than by caseload, suggesting that people were more likely to claim larger awards. Rachael brought the discussion back to councils. In her view, persistently low household incomes mean more arrears, lower receipts and greater pressure on services, including adult and children’s social care.
What happens when claiming becomes a job in itself
Sean O’Sullivan questioned whether Universal Credit’s work-related requirements put some people off claiming altogether. He singled out younger claimants who might face frequent appointments for a modest award. He recalled an accountant who tried to claim after redundancy and eventually gave up. The experience, Sean said, had made it too much trouble to get the short spell of help he needed.
Rachael focused on what happens once people are in work. Monthly assessment periods can produce sharp changes in Universal Credit for people paid weekly or earning irregularly, while rent and council tax still fall due on their usual dates. She recalled warning in 2012 that those assessment periods could create problems for council tax billing. Malcolm argued that the policy had been designed around an assumption that paid work meant a monthly wage, an assumption that fits poorly with the lives of many lower-paid workers. Bob urged caution about reading too much into the figures on sustained earnings. A claimant disappearing from the figures might have lost work or moved into a job that paid enough to take them off Universal Credit. Those outcomes tell very different stories.
Ian Savigar described what it takes to turn a list of likely claimants into successful awards. In Hackney, he had worked with Age UK to contact potential Pension Credit claimants and help them complete the forms. Some mixed-age couples were then wrongly told by the DWP contact centre that they did not qualify, he recalled. The campaign had found people and helped them through the paperwork, only for an error at the next stage to stop their claims. In Reading, Ian said, some residents seeking crisis support were giving up partway through a wider income check. The council had simplified the application so it could get payments out more quickly.
What councils can do with the information they already hold
Ian said Reading was looking at using Universal Credit notifications to award Council Tax Reduction more automatically. That raised a question for the council’s budget. If the existing application process was screening out eligible residents, what would happen to scheme expenditure when more of them received the reduction?
Penny Mitchell described Salford’s experience since introducing that approach in April 2025. She said the council had reached more eligible residents without seeing an increase in scheme spending. In her account, frequent updates helped Salford avoid excess awards and correct accounts sooner, while timely reductions helped prevent some council tax debt from building up. Mark Stewart reported little change in scheme costs at Camden. He said the additional cost could depend on a council’s backdating rules and how long residents would otherwise have waited before applying.
For Rachael, central government should take responsibility for finding people who are missing out. Kevin Stewart agreed, arguing that too much of the work had fallen to councils. Gareth pointed to work in Wales on using common data to award devolved benefits automatically where feasible. He also recalled a DWP trial in which some people received an initial Pension Credit payment but did not provide the information needed to continue it. Privacy concerns mattered. The discussion moved from whether public bodies could identify potential claimants to whether people trusted them enough to share the information needed to secure an award.
Two homes in a hundred
The question of what support was worth in practice became sharper when the group turned to Local Housing Allowance (LHA). Malcolm cited rental listings analysis suggesting that just 1.9% of newly advertised homes were affordable at LHA rates in 2025/26, down from 2.7% the previous year. He asked how much choice a household really had when fewer than two homes in every hundred advertised were within reach, and how long discretionary help could bridge a gap that kept recurring.
Ian said Reading was using more discretionary housing support through its Crisis and Resilience Fund to help tenants struggling with LHA shortfalls. Sean traced the widening gap back through the move from the median rent to the 30th percentile and the subsequent freezes. He also recalled an early feature of LHA that let tenants keep some of the difference if they found a cheaper property. In his view, that gave tenants a reason to shop around and was one way to exert downward pressure on rents.
Gareth approached the same question from the landlord’s side. If public support were to meet actual rents more fully, he argued, some form of rent control would be needed alongside it. Malcolm questioned how much a discussion about house prices could tell the group about what low-income renters could afford. Even if buying became easier for some households, a family trying to find a tenancy within its LHA rate would still face the same search.
Who pays when a tenancy fails?
Rachael argued that repeatedly freezing LHA was poor economics when councils were spending heavily on temporary accommodation. Her strongest point was about what happens to children who grow up without a stable home. The disruption to education, the stress and the effects on health can last for years, long after the council has closed the accounts for the year in which a family first needed help.
Sean said unitary councils might be better placed to see those costs together. A district council paying for temporary accommodation may never see the resulting pressure on children’s or adult social care. Bringing housing, benefits and social services into the same conversation, he argued, would make it easier to judge when paying to keep someone in a secure home could reduce the overall cost.
Bob had the last word. Areas with the greatest housing difficulties and highest levels of poverty, he said, could also be the places where local council taxpayers were asked to carry the heaviest costs. He called for a fresh look at how social security, housing, health and care support people over a lifetime. Malcolm joked that the project might simply be called social security. Bob replied that they would need to find someone called Beveridge to write it. Behind the joke was a question for the next spending decision. If one part of government saves money while another picks up the cost of a family losing its home, whose budget should decide whether that was a saving?
The Recording can be found here
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