West Midlands council stops £1.6m of social housing fraud

Over the two-year period, 13 cases of social housing application fraud were stopped, worth £42,120. In these cases, tenancy offers were withdrawn and/or applicants were excluded from the waiting list for a council property.

Five further cases of tenancy subletting were discovered and properties were recovered, saving the council £465,000, a report to the council said. One illegal subletting took place in 2021-22 and the other four occurred in 2022-23.

Each case of prevented social housing tenancy fraud was valued at £93,000 per property recovered, based on an average four-year fraudulent tenancy and an estimate of the duration that the fraud may have continued undetected.

This includes temporary accommodation for genuine applicants, legal costs to recover the property, re-let cost and rent foregone during the void period between tenancies, the report said.

Meanwhile, five cases worth £465,000 were stopped where an applicant was prevented from obtaining a tenancy they were not entitled to.

Two fraudulent Right to Buy applications, worth £168,400, were stopped, with a further five cases of non-occupation – people not using the property as a residence – saving £465,000.

Mark Wilkes, audit business partner at Wolverhampton Council, told councillors there was “no particular reason” that levels of tenancy fraud seemed to have risen since 2020.

He said: “The subletting cases are the more complicated ones to investigate; there’s a lot more background work that needs to be done and built up to form a proper case. There was also the impact of COVID whereby a lot of recovery action was not allowable and investigations could not take place.”