The figures which were given me by the Council in response to a Freedom of Information Request were not accurate, owing to “IT systems updates that the reports had not calculated correctly that weekend”. The situation is worse than reported.
A council officer has given me corrected and updated figures for December 3rd.
-
There are 1,080 tenants on UC. Of these 829 are in arrears – 76%.
-
The arrears owed by UC claimants are £700,587. Overall arrears for council tenants are £1,308,547. So UC arrears comprise 53.5% of all arrears for current tenants.
-
The average owed by UC claimants is £845.09.
You can see the impact of Universal Credit when you compare the arrears for November 2016 when it went fully live. These were £894,903 as compared to £1,308,547 today.
Martin Wicks
December 8th 2017
Swindon Tenants Campaign Group 
This should be read in the knowledge that Swindon still has 5,000 housing benefits claimants of a working age which are yet to migrate on to universal credit and these arrears of rental totals are reflected by every other council. If the conservative party deals with these rental arrears in the same manner as they are dealing with Brexit then God help us
LikeLike