The Residential Landlords Association has campaigned for more flexibility in Local Housing Allowance payments since the government changed the system to make the payments direct to claimants, trusting them to pass it onto their landlords. Rent arrears have grown and landlords have been threatening to take their properties off the housing allowance market.

One of their complaints has been about the eight week period that landlords have to wait before they can ask for arrears to be paid direct to them, but now, a tribunal ruling has cut that period by half. The Department of Work and Pensions now says that, when a tenant has already skipped one month’s rent, the landlord can claim the arrears on the day after the second payment is missed.

“That effectively cuts the two-month wait to very little more than one month,” says the chairman of the RLA, Alan Ward. “Councils should now follow this guidance – which will ease cashflow and losses for landlords who have been growing wary of accepting housing allowance tenants. If the government was less rigid, and allowed tenants to have the allowance paid direct to landlords, the situation would improve overnight.”