Council expects to repay tenants more than £4.3m

Cambridge City Council hopes to start making the first repayments later this year, with some tenants owed thousands

Historical errors which led to housing tenants being overcharged will cost a council more than £4.3m in repayments, it believes.

Cambridge City Council revealed it had made errors in how it set rent and service charges in January, with some going back 20 years.

Officials said they had contacted all its affected current council tenants and corrected the rents.

The council is now working towards refunding the overpayments, with some tenants owed thousands of pounds.

'Significant workload'

It hopes to start making the first refunds later this year.

Officers told a housing scrutiny committee meeting they had "closed the window" on the error period, as reported by the Local Democracy Reporting Service.

The first error related to the authority not correctly applying a one-per cent rent reduction under The Welfare Reform and Work Act 2016 to its affordable rented homes.

The second error related to how rent and service charges were displayed on rent accounts since the introduction of rent restructuring from April 2002 and the subsequent separation out of the service charges from April 2004.

The council needs to review more than 23,000 tenancies over the last 20 years and set up a team to manage the "significant workload".

It is liaising with the Department for Work and Pensions on how any Universal Credit overpayments should be refunded.

However, a GDPR process which saw former tenants' details wiped from the system after six years means it no longer holds the details of all those impacted by the rent error.

Eventually, the city council will ask any former tenant who believes they were impacted by a rent error to get in touch.

They would need to provide evidence they lived in an affected property and refunds would be considered on a case by case basis.