You are unemployed and you are tipped off about a job with a decent amount of hours. A friend of yours works there. The job is that of a care assistant in a day centre to assist those with a variety of disabilities. The job is not very well paid but as it does not require experience or apparently any special skills then there is a good chance of getting it. You get the job. It is about 10 miles out of the city and there are two buses to get there, unless you walk to the bus station in town and save a bus fare. The pay is such that you are still entitled to a certain amount of housing benefit. Claiming housing benefit requires turning up at the housing department, providing proof or earnings, and filling out forms. The housing office is run by the council rather than the department social security. Typically there will be a delay between the claim and receipt of the benefit, this can sometimes be months. Landlords with many tenants in receipt of benefit will be used to this situation and may be forgiving of the delay as long as there is proof that the claim is in progress. The landlord will ask about progress weekly or more often.
You will need to visit the housing benefit offices at least weekly, they will be open during the hours you are working, if your employer understands you may be able to alter your working hours to fit in a visit. You may be working such hours that it is possible to make a brief visit in the morning or at the end of the day, however as there will be a queue there is no guarantee you will be seen in time. There may also be particular members in the housing benefit team who understand your case better than others, they will not always be available, and if you get someone else then time is wasted repeating the background to the claim. It may appear that this ought to be straightforward - does this number fall above/below this range, if so do this, etc. However, there will be ambiguities, and the overstretched housing benefit team will make mistakes, will misread payslips, will fill in the wrong form, will receive ambiguous or wrong information from the social security department, and will lose evidence.
Your take home pay after tax is not a great deal more than “the amount of money the law says you need to live on” which is what you would have received in benefit, excluding housing benefit. Transport costs to work come out of this, and there are other benefits you are no longer entitled to now you are working. You are very much worse off even before paying any rent, however you are making an effort to get out of unemployment. Things will be worse for you but you are prepared to put up with it as you think your prospects may improve.
Meanwhile another vacancy has cropped up where you work and one of your housemates (you live in a shared house with a total of three occupants) has succeeded in getting the job. The housing benefit of your housemate is resolved in a matter of a couple of weeks. Your housing benefit has still not turned up, and this is some months later, your landlord is losing patience and has started eviction proceedings. You have been making a token rent payment each week already, which has left you even further short of funds. The housing benefit problems drag on and so the eviction proceedings make it to court. A member of the housing benefit team is scheduled to be there to explain the position. How this works out, given that housing benefit are in disarray over the problem, is never discovered as that member of the housing benefit team is on holiday and no one else has been appointed to cover for them.
The court determines that there should be a continuation of the token weekly payment as they have an understanding that the case is still being dealt with by the housing benefit team. However they are more stringent on how the token payment should be made. You will have to visit the Landlord to deliver the token payment in person, weekly, previously the landlord collected the payment.
You visit the landlord on the appointed day, this entails a round trip of a six mile mile walk, or two buses in each direction. Your landlord isn’t in but another representative of his is available. However the representative refuses to accept the payment saying that it will need paying directly to him. This happens numerous times. You are now in default of the agreement and the landlord can now pursue eviction proceedings.
Meanwhile your housemate’s rent is being paid to the same landlord, while doing the same job, and going through exactly the same claim process.
Your housing benefit team sympathise. They are working on it. You might wonder at this point, in what might be considered a coarse manner, “how fucking hard can this be”.
Time passes and the eviction order arrives, that’s it, you are out on the street. You have a job, you have not done anything untoward to cause this but due to a combination of factors, lack of understanding, greed, corruption, and incompetence, you are in an unfortunate position.
The landlord is ecstatic. He has removed a sitting tenant, and also offers the other two tenants a cash incentive to leave. There is an offer of other accommodation for them, by moving on the sitting tenants he has changed which laws apply to the next set of tenants in that house and is able to extract more money and remove tenants more easily. A win for him so he was happy to pay.
You on the other hand are in a bit of a quandary. You visit the housing benefit office and in some bizarre act of competence they have resolved the problem. They have determined what housing benefit you are entitled to and they give you a cheque to cover the period until the day of eviction. They suggest you look for somewhere else to live.
A week of sleeping on someone’s floor later you locate another landlord. You will now have to go through the process of claiming housing benefit again.
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