Terms & Conditions

[LauraA]

I know this thread is old but can I please have thoughts for something similar I am dealing with.
We have been cracking down on landlords Intensive Housing Management Costs.
We have asked for salary breakdowns of those involved in providing the IHM and then compared this to the time spent on ‘Eligible Housing Related tasks’.

We have a Registered Landlord and we found just 22 employees were apparently providing 1.91 hours of low level support for 900 units and most units were also getting an additional 1 hours IHM so 2.91 in total.
All the IHM is done centrally (there are no support workers salaries shown on the salary sheet just administrators’ salaries and all looks office based). The low level support alone would command 1719 hours per week so assuming all 22 staff are full time (40 hours) they would only be available for approx 880 hours.

I don’t see how the landlord can be providing nearly 3 hours per week support , that is completely unrealistic based on the number of staff employed to operate the scheme. No third parties are providing additional care so the exempt accommodation status was solely based on landlord giving 3 hours CSS via IHM.

We have cancelled these claims now as landlord not responded to how the scheme can provide the support stated but I am minded to cancel all the IHM paid back to the start of the claim and raise an o/p to the landlord as I just do not see how they could be providing this service and can only summise they have been mispresenting the support provided.

Would anyone else cancel these back and is there someone I should report the landlord to? Everything about the First Tier suggests it is up to tenants to challenge but when they are in supported properties are they really going to do so?

Also the same RSL has other schemes too which thankfully did show Support Workers salaries and had excluded a portion of personal care in the IHM calculation but we still found the landlord had over inflated their actual staff expenses by 21% when working out their IHM service charges= again this seems like service charge abuse. .

There is no consistency as in another scheme they inflated the staff costings by 16% but we found one scheme where the IHM charges had been over-stated by a massive a 47% against the actual salaries and staff expenses provided.

That seems an extortionate working margin and no surpise I’ve had no reply when I asked why they needed such a high working margin.

If we already allow admin costs at 17% percentage which includes overheads, salaries for administering schemes etc then would anyone allow a separate surcharge on the staff expenses too. As they have over-inflated the IHM service charges and it doesnt represent their staff wages bill I wondered how best to deal with as I feel the landlord is taking advantage of the system- I could allow a surcharge of 16% the lowest of the three schemes but that still feels quite high when we give then a percentage for admin anyway- anyone’s thoughts or comments would be appreciated.