Mid Devon council to review 70 rent overcharge evictions

About 70 council tenant evictions could be reviewed in Mid Devon as council officials grapple with social housing rent errors dating back to 2002.

There are cases where rent arrears were the sole factor, or a contributory one, leading to the eviction of tenants after they were overcharged, according to the Local Democracy Reporting Service.

The cases are to be reviewed once Mid Devon District Council has dealt with the major issue of refunding about 1,200 tenants it had been overcharging for years.

In other cases beyond the 70 highlighted, where rent arrears were one of several factors, the council said anti-social behaviour, crime, unauthorised uses and tenancy fraud were the predominant reasons for eviction.

The council estimates it needs £1.8 million to repay roughly 1,200 tenants who have been paying more rent than they should have.

Legal advice suggests the council only needs to repay six years of overpaid rent, according to LDRS.

Once individual amounts have been calculated tenants will be told whether they will also receive compensation.

In terms of the 70 eviction cases, the council said various “mitigation factors” could protect it from any required action.

These include rent levels being set in good faith and agreed with the tenant, overcharging still leading to rents within expected social-rent levels and people on low incomes could have received up to 100% support for their rent.

The wider social rent error of over and under charging tenants goes back to 2002, but was only identified towards the end of last year by the council’s new auditor, Bishop Fleming.

It was caused by the council applying a rent formula to its whole stock in one go, rather than segmenting it by property size and applying the formula on each segment individually.

This also led to about 1,600 tenants being undercharged.

As soon as the error was identified, the council said it referred itself to the Regulator for Social Housing.