S117, Accommodation and Housing Benefit

Law and practice
1

In several cases over the last few years, the LGO has said in their judgements that for individuals who have accommodation included within their s117 aftercare plans, they should not be asked to claim housing benefit to cover the cost of this accommodation. Does anyone have an actual source for this statement? It is of course not mentioned in the Act itself and neither is it mentioned in the Code of Practice.

I can see it mentioned in a sentence in their own LGO guidance around s117 (published in 2022), but there is no source or reasoning provided for this. I fully understand the principle behind this; s117 is to be provided free of charge and actually housing benefit is means tested leading to issues where people do have money, inherit it, or how much exactly housing benefit will cover. But still, I would love to know where the LGO got this often used statement from if anyone knows?

Thanks

2

I think it might be the Ombudsman’s own legal position. From the decisions that reference HB, it appears that their position following Stennett is “HB is means-tested/contingent; s117 accommodation is a free-standing right; requiring patient to claim HB is an impermissible shifting of the statutory funding duty.”

I think that must be correct. That position has not been challenged in any High Court judgments I can think of. The closest would be R (Afework) which differentiates between means-tested assistance under the NAA 1948 and S117 which is non-means tested.