Rent increase announcement

Housing Minister Margaret Beckett has announced new support to help councils cut their rent increases for tenants.

Mrs Beckett announced that the Government would make funding available to help local authorities to make the changes, so that rent increases would be smaller than originally planned for 2009/10.

We are committed to ensuring that tenants benefit from savings fully and will implement Government advice as quickly as possible.

Implementing the Changes

We are waiting for the Government’s proposals. When we receive them it will take six weeks for us to comment upon them. We will then need to re-run our rent systems, benefit systems, change Direct Debits and send new rent increase letters to tenants.

The Government will be advising us of the details about how to apply the smaller rent increase towards the end of April 2009 so it is likely the changes will not be made until June 2009. The Government’s announcement says that the changes will be effective from the 1 April but we will still need to see the Government’s detailed advice on this.

Our customers had already received their rent increase notifications before the Government’s announcement and we are required to give a minimum of 28 days notice of any change to rent. This means that until the Government has released details of the new calculations we are advising tenants to pay the amount of rent given in their most recent notification.

As with our normal annual rent increase we expect the rent change will require the approval of Stevenage Homes’ Board and the Council. Preparations for these meetings are underway.