Michael Patterson has approaching 20 years’ experience in working with enhanced Housing Benefit. Michael’s approach has the distinction of being collaborative. When representing supported housing providers Michael maintains a non-adversarial approach to Revenues and Benefits colleagues, a forensic approach to justifying the basis of an enhanced Housing Benefit claim and a concern to enable local authorities to fully recover the enhanced Housing Benefit they pay via their subsidy claim to the DWP. This is often achieved via the Exempt Accommodation Project, which Michael formed in 2021.
Michael has up to the minute knowledge of enhanced Housing Benefit matters, for example, the DWP Housing Benefit Guidance for Supported Housing Claims. Michael also uses a particular spreadsheet model and a very forensic approach that breaks down an enhanced Housing Benefit claim to the penny per week per resident across the entire basis of claim. This is helpful to both supported housing providers and to Revenues and Benefits, both of whom need an audit trail to justify the level of claim.
If you’re a local authority approved supported housing provider that needs help with enhanced Housing Benefit claims, please contact me. My costs are transparently included within the revised enhanced Housing Benefit claims I devise and submit, so my services are effectively cost-neutral.
Please note that I do not work on enhanced Housing Benefit claims with agencies that do not have local authority approval to operate as supported housing providers. I do not assist recently established supported housing providers to gain approval from local authorities to operate as supported housing providers.
Many local authorities are struggling with subsidy loss as a consequence of enhanced Housing Benefit claims from supported housing providers where the landlord isn’t a registered provider. In such circumstances local authorities can only reclaim 60% of the difference between the appropriate LHA amount and the amount of the claim. In order to help mitigate local authority subsidy loss Michael formed the Exempt Accommodation Project, which has become very successful with several hundred units of accommodation in management and half a dozen registered provider partners, many of them YMCAs.
If you work for a local authority and are seeking a solution to subsidy loss, please contact me.
Contact me 0800 772 0065