Rent arrears delays maintenance works

COMPLAINTS that tenants who are in rent arrears can’t get maintenance work carried out on their homes were aired by Cllr Anne Campbell.

She highlighted an incident in which a women with five children was living in a house with gaps between the window frame and wall. She said that while the woman was in arrears she had entered a payment plan but still had to go through the recent cold weather with those conditions.

Cllr Campbell wanted to know what the waiting time was for rent reassessment when people have a change in their circumstances as this led to a lot of knock-ons from rent arrears. People were asking to get their houses fixed but with so many rent arrears none of it was being done,

Cllr Antoin Watters said that people had accumulated arrears because of the delays in reassessments.

Senior Executive Officer Ms Aoife Lawler said that dealing with rent arrears was ‘an on-going battle’ for the local authority.

She said the council had been targeting people with substantial arrears as a result of which many had entered payment plans.

Unfortunately they had to evict a tenant for non-payment after the woman had failed to honour a payment plan.

‘It’s not a scenario we want to happen,’ she said. She told Cllr Campbell that the arrears were ‘a significant amount’.

Ms Lawler told the meeting that the top 50 owing the most money had entered into payment plans but the amount that they were paying back was small as they couldn’t afford to pay much more.

‘If people are in a payment plan for eight weeks, they are eligible for maintenance work,’ she said.

While they were working on reducing the time it takes for reassessment of tenant’s means, because of the amount of misinformation tenants had given in the past, it takes a lot of time.