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We’ve seen an increase in the number of young people asking for help with housing issues in recent months.
Housing Rights for Young People is our specialist support service for young people in housing need. The service offers young people aged between 18-25 (or thereabouts):
Households in Northern Ireland are in danger of falling even deeper into housing poverty over the forthcoming months, according to local housing advice charity Housing Rights.
With the withdrawal of government financial support measures introduced at the start of the pandemic coupled with soaring living costs, it is becoming more difficult for households to manage, with many accruing debts in order to get by.
Universal Credit may refuse a claim for help to pay a person’s housing costs if
they think that a tenancy is not a genuine commercial relationship between a landlord and a tenant or
they believe the tenancy was created to take advantage of the benefit system.
It’s important to get advice quickly if this happens to you or to your clients. Submitting a well-argued mandatory reconsideration request can help to prevent homelessness.
The Cliff Edge Coalition is once again urgently calling for legislation to be passed to extend the welfare reform mitigations package. Without new legislation, mitigations will end in March 2021.The Coalition is further calling for this legislation to close loopholes in the existing arrangements which have left thousands unprotected from the benefit cap and bedroom tax.
BBC News NI reported last week on system failures within Universal Credit that have left some local tenants in rent arrears. We’d encourage anyone who has fallen behind on their housing payments to get advice urgently, regardless of the reasons for missed payments.
Over 126,000 people in Northern Ireland were claiming Universal Credit on 26 April 2020, an increase of 80% from the figure of 70,000 claimants just 8 weeks earlier on 1 March, according to recently released information from the Department for Communities. The number of applications during that 8-week period totalled 65,700.
