1. I write to request information on the number of households claiming Universal Credit and/or housing benefit who have presented to you as homeless while between January 2019 and April 2022. As part of this request, I would like this information to be broken down into the following;

We have not been able to provide the requested data between January 2019 and July 2019 as we did not record this information specifically at that moment in time, we would need to look at each individual applicant’s paper file for this period and read through the whole file to see if we did record whether they received either benefit; this would exceed 18 hours as we don’t even hold a list of applicants who presented as homeless during that time frame so would need to look at each archived file to establish if they fall within this time period. We did not start recording this data electronically until October 2019 and then it was collated in a spreadsheet.

a) The total number of households claiming Universal Credit presenting as homeless since January 2019, broken down into households living in leasehold property and council-owned property (otherwise known as council tenants) and years;

Total no of households claiming UC presenting as homeless
July 2019 – March 2020: 79
April 2020 – March 2021: 105
April 2021 – March 2022: 96

Leasehold property
July 2019 – March 2020: 1
April 2020 – March 2021: 1
April 2021 – March 2022: 2

Council – owned property
July 2019 – March 2020: 5
April 2020 – March 2021: 4
April 2021 – March 2022: 3

b) The total number of households claiming housing benefit – part of the legacy welfare system – presenting as homeless since January 2019, broken down into households living in leasehold property and council-owned property (otherwise known as council tenants) and years.

Total no of households claiming UC presenting as homeless
July 2019 – March 2020: 41
April 2020 – March 2021: 30
April 2021 – March 2022: 49

Leasehold property
July 2019 – March 2020: 3
April 2020 – March 2021: 0
April 2021 – March 2022: 0

Council – owned property
July 2019 – March 2020: 1
April 2020 – March 2021: 1
April 2021 – March 2022: 3