Fresource Friday: guide to homeless application review and appeal rights

If you follow homelessness case law you may have noticed a case last November where the Court of Appeal suggested that the information a council gave to a homeless person was deficient.

The case was Birmingham CC v Wilson [2016] EWCA Civ 1137.

What the case was about

The case involved a homeless applicant, Ms Wilson, who was owed the main housing duty. However she refused a final offer of accommodation that the council made to end the duty. The council considered the accommodation was suitable. As Ms Wilson refused the offer the council unsurprisingly decided that its duty to accommodate her had ended.

Options

However, Ms Wilson could have accepted the offer and requested a review. This would have had the advantage that if her review was unsuccessful (which it subsequently was) she would still have had accommodation available to her.

When Ms Wilson sought to complain that the offer was unsuitable she was given a 'Homeless Decision Review Form'. The form had various options she could tick, including:

• Box f - "You have accepted the offer of accommodation. However, you do not consider that the offer made was suitable to discharge the Council's duty to provide accommodation"; and
• Box g - "You considered the offer made was not suitable to discharge the Council's duty to provide accommodation".

Ms Wilson initially ticked box f, but then crossed that out and ticked box g instead, thereby indicating her wish to refuse the offer.

Criticism

The judge giving the leading judgment made the following observation:

LJ Sales went on to observe that the Review Form also did not explain the consequences of each option.

He then suggested:

These observations were not actually relevant to the legal issue being decided, and the council succeeded in their appeal. And it's difficult to reach an opinion on whether and to what extent the comments were justified, because (as the judge acknowledged) we don't have all the literature given to Ms Wilson (nor for that matter details of what advice was given verbally).

Dilemma

However, the judge's comments do demonstrate a common dilemma for housing staff who write documents and publish information for customers.

Namely:

And:

If you give too much information at the wrong time you'll bamboozle the customer. For example if someone is about to become homeless you need to spend the limited time available focussing on finding a housing solution and dealing with the urgent issues arising, rather than telling them everything they'll possibly ever need to know. (I've yet to meet a council officer who thinks it's a good idea to present a homeless person with reams of paperwork when they first ask for help).

On the other hand if the applicant can't access the right information when they need it they may be at risk of suffering an injustice. And it can cost councils and social landlords time and money if a customer doesn't understand 'how the system works' or their responsibilities.

In Ms Wilson's case it may have been possible to avoid undertaking a costly review if she had understood the options and the consequences of refusing the offer (although to be fair to Birmingham it's far from clear from the judgment whether this would have been the case).

Using the web

Obviously many social landlords have moved a lot of information historically given out in hard copy onto their websites. This surely has to be the right approach when most people have a phone and internet access.

And the trend towards mobile/tablet-friendly web pages that deliver information in 'bite site chunks' has the potential to make information much more digestible.

However, at the same time I'm so often left unimpressed when visiting many websites. Often there just isn't the basic information that customers will routinely need.

In the worst cases you end up wondering whether a conscious decision has been made to strictly limit the information that's publicly available (and in relation to homelessness it's often unclear from websites even how to make a homeless application. Something that will have to be rectified before the Homelessness Reduction Bill is implemented, if councils want to facilitate effective prevention).

In short, if you want your customers to be informed and you want to reduce unnecessary customer contact it's essential that there's adequate information available for the customer to access if and when they need it.

The provision of comprehensive online information can become an integral way of how customers obtain information about your service. Staff can then refer customers to the online information.

Question

Personally I thought that the explanation from the final offer letter quoted by LJ Sales was perfectly clear and concise.

For those involved in publishing information the more pertinent question in the particular Birmingham v Wilson scenario perhaps should be:

Today's free resource

The Wilson case got me thinking about how many questions a homeless applicant might need answered when asking the council to review an adverse decision, i.e. all those things you might need to communicate if and when the applicant asks a question about the review process.

So I wrote a guide.

Approach

If you download the guide you'll see that my approach is to:

• be comprehensive (after all if the information is online you can structure it so the customer only need access the specific information they need);
• adopt a 'question and answer' style. This way the information is more meaningful to the customer; and
• use plain English.

Other resources

Other documents for councils and social landlords are available in the Resources section that deal with homeless reviews:

• Requesting a s.202 homeless review (form)
• Acknowledging a homeless review request, and confirming the review procedure & deadline for submissions
• Approving temporary accommodation pending review
• Refusing a request for temporary accommodation pending the outcome of a s.202 homeless review (Mohammed decision)
• Asking a homeless applicant to agree to the extension the deadline for notifying the review decision
• 'Minded to' letter notifying applicant of deficiencies in original decision and offering an oral hearing
• Quashing an original homeless decision & passing the decision back to the original decision-maker
• Review decision letter

If you work for a council in Wales, go the Resources section, and simply search for "section 85 review".

How to access these additional resources

All you need to do is:

1. Create an account, using your work email (you'll receive a confirmation email);
2. Wait for your application to be approved (you'll receive a second confirmation email);
3. Purchase credits OR take advantage of the free documents offer(see bottom of webpage); and
4. Go to the relevant page in the Resources section for the relevant document, and click on the pdf, docx or txt download link.