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 billions of taxpayer's funds have been spent on housing benefit it is not clear in every case who the ultimate recipients are.
For 30 per cent 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.
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Comments
'Name & Shame' ! In general I feel that landlords are brave taking on DSS tenants if they do so in a genuine manner. OK landlords who abuse by setting up HMO's without licences, who allow unethical overcrowding or who mistreat the tenants in other ways are to be ashamed, but the majority of good landlords do not deserve this treatment. Perhaps if some of these big names happen to also be employed by the local council, or friends/relatives/associates of influential members of the local council then that warrants investigating. But from what I can see it is more small scale private landlords, who avoid agents, who are likely to abuse tenants by actions such as allowing overcrowding. I know of a local private landlord who allegedly has charged 8 Polish abattoir workers 50 per week each for a 2 double bed flat with 1 reception room ... usually rent would be about 475 pcm so he is overcharging hugely, almost fourfold! Neighbours below have been rather unhappy at the endless comings & goings as 8 people work shifts all around the clock.
Indeed. Name and "Shame". What is the shame in doing the governments work. They are the ones who sold off Council houses !
Shame in you Daily Mirror
Why is it "naming and shaming" for a landlord to be in receipt of housing benefit Surely SOME of the individual tenants in receipt of housing benefit are the ones who should be ashamed By these I mean the workshy, the scroungers, fraudsters and those few specific foreigners who come here to steal benefit money. Many many immigrants provide a great service to our economy and pay tax like the indigenous population. Landlords are going to rent to tenant-demand and in some areas there are virtually no workers, and in others there are very few landlords who will accept benefit tenants. It seems that we are, yet again, vilifying the wrong people. If The same argument/research had been put into housing associations, in addition to private landlords I would see some degree of fairness in the research - but hey- whoever could accuse the Daily Mirror of imnpartiality.