Terms & Conditions

[junderwo]

Over the past 6 months we have been changing our method of payment from cheque to BACS and we are now left with a hardcore of tenants who do not want to be paid by BACS

We want to get away from cheques payments as much as possible so I wonder if any Council has come up with any ingenious ways of coercing claimants into obtaining a bank account. I would be especially keen to hear from Council’s piloting LHA where the option of paying the money direct to the L/L is restricted.

Thanks in anticipation.

[Anonymous]

Personally I think you are being evil and wicked in wanting to ‘coerce’ unwilling people into opening bank accounts. For lo, is it not written in the HBR 2006 that:

“the relevant authority shall pay housing benefit to which a person is entitled under these Regulations at such time and in such manner as is appropriate, having regard to…[b:d255f0034f]the reasonable needs and convenience of the person entitled thereto.[/b:d255f0034f]”

Which to my mind means you can’t have a ‘one size fits all’ policy of BACS only. If I was one of your claimants and you tried to coerce me I’d have that Ombudsman chappie on to you…

[Anonymous]

[quote:c4495a996e]”the relevant authority shall pay housing benefit to which a person is entitled under these Regulations at such time and in such manner as is appropriate, having regard to…the reasonable needs and convenience of the person entitled thereto
[/quote:c4495a996e]

……unless you are dealing with state benefits then you can force them to either open bank accounts or post office accounts that will be phased out in three years thereby forcing recipients to open bank accounts.

We have just embarked on the path of offering BACS to our HB customers, but in an attempt to make it appealing we went round the local banks and asked them for details of the “basic” bank accounts that they offer. This was all sent out with the letter offering the BACS service.

Too early to judge the success or otherwise as yet.

Anyway, I thought that you needed a bank account to be able to pay your Sky Subscription…………. 😉

[karent]

2 years ago I wrote to all our private tenants & initially offered BACS – enclosing a form for them to fill in & return

i sent gentle reminders to the ‘hardcore’ element and we also trawled thru their current claim and banged them onto BACS where any bank details were held by us

then i sent letters telling them we were stopping payment by cheque which seemed to do the trick as we now pay over 97% by BACS. The only ones left as cheque pyts are the 2 customers who want pyt by chq cos otherwise the HB will just reduce their overdraft…….and the handful of pensioners who kept giving us wrong info which led to delayed payments so we reverted back to chq cos they were getting stressed (so were we!)

any new PT claimant is told we pay by BACS only so we get their details off em at start of claim process

A BACS payment costs about 0.01. Issuing cheques costs about £4000.00 per cheque (I exaggerate but it’s vastly more expensive). Given things like Gershon, BACS is the only way to go. We saved over £4k by paying by BACS last year

[Anonymous]

So are we saying that on this subject the regulations are “advice only”?

[karent]

no we are not saying that at all

paying by BACS is considered ‘apprioriate’ by this LA
& is far more convenient for the customer. Where they gave valid reasons, we reverted to cheque and so have given regard the the needs of the customer

[Anonymous]

Telling all your new PT claimants that you pay by BACS only doesn’t seem to be having regard to the needs and convenience of the claimant from the git go…and who are you or I to tell a claimant that BACS is far more convenient for them?

It seems to me that to honour the requirements of the regulations we should offer (and advertise) at least two payment methods.

[karent]

it’s fairly obvious that it is more convenient for them & where it isn’t, they tell us so.

Your opinion is that 2 methods of payment should be offered. Mine is to save money, pay people in (what is my opinion) the most cost effective and easy way and is in tandem with Directpay, whilst still having the option of paying by cheque where we are asked to

[Anonymous]

Where we differ is that you expect people to [i:9337f5d475]ask[/i:9337f5d475] for a different payment method where they don’t want BACS (and not everybody is necessarily going to do that), whereas I think a choice should be offered from the start, which is not a huge difference of opinion. But what I do object to is comments such as junderwo’s about “coercing” people into obtaining a bank account. I am just a little concerned that there may be some authorities who are moving to BACS only for the predominant reason of the LA’s own financial interest, and not giving full consideration to people’s wants or needs.

[Anonymous]

We allow either method but point out that BACS is easier and cheques can be lost and take time to clear.

[Author]

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