The exercise of judicial discretion in rent arrears cases - Sheffield ...

anomalous case of West Country court, which involved only ten cases in total); and fewer
cases are dismissed, withdrawn, or struck out. These findings confirm the common
perception amongst the practitioners who took part in the focus groups, and indeed of the
district judges themselves, that housing benefit issues are distorting the work of county
courts in dealing with rent arrears cases.
Judges’ views and knowledge of housing benefit
In our interviews with district judges, almost all of them mentioned housing benefit as a
problem before being prompted to discuss it, and it became clear that the issue is a very
complex one. The two main problems with housing benefit are:
Delays in payment can lead to apparent arrears which will in fact be paid once the
claim has been properly processed.
Errors in calculating benefits can lead to disputes over the amount of rent arrears.
Frequently the district judge is called upon to decide whether the delay or error has been
caused by the tenant failing to provide the necessary information, or by the failure of the
housing benefit administration to keep to time limits or their negligence in dealing with
documents supplied by the tenant.
DJ B expressed the frustrations of many of the district judges about housing benefit when he
said that “we really are in Wonderland here”, meaning that it was often impossible to find out
the true situation regarding rent arrears. This view was amplified by DJ F:
“Really…nobody can make sense of what’s happening, you know. Nobody knows:
the tenant doesn’t know, and the landlord doesn’t know, what the real position is.
And everybody knows that what the tenant’s being asked to pay is not likely to be the
right figure. So the whole thing becomes nonsensical really.”
In describing housing benefit, no fewer than four of the district judges described it as “a
nightmare” while many others used phrases such as “overwhelming issue”, “huge problem”,
and “bugbear”. This situation impacts on the work of the county court in two specific ways.
First, the delay and possible errors in administering housing benefit mean that more arrears
cases are brought to court. DJ Q estimated that:
“If housing benefit was sorted out we would have half the cases we do (laughs)…I
mean, if you didn’t have those housing benefit problems, I would say the majority of
cases probably would never come to the court, they wouldn’t be listed.”
Secondly, district judges often have no option but to adjourn a proportion of cases in each
list for further information about the defendant’s housing benefit claim:
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