Reporting tenancy fraud

Tenancy fraud is when someone misuses a social housing property and this can be in a number of ways.

The most common types of tenancy fraud are:

• When someone breaches their tenancy agreement by:
• not using the property as their main home
• leaving the property without telling us, known as abandonment.
• signing over the property to someone else without our permission, known as an assignment or a mutual exchange
• wrongly claiming they have the right to live in the property after a tenant has died, known as succession
• subletting all or part of the property without permission.
• Trying to get a property by using false or misleading statements, information or documents.
• Not giving us information which may affect their right to have a property.
• Key selling, where someone is given a tenancy but they never move in, instead sells the keys to someone else.
• Joint tenancy fraud, where a sole tenant tells their landlord that their partner has moved in and they want a joint tenancy, but as soon as this is granted they move out, leaving the other person in the property.

• It means that we have little or no control over managing the property, including being able to deal with antisocial behaviour or repairs issues.
• We can suffer financial losses as a result of lost rent, repayment of direct benefit payments, legal costs including evictions, staff time involved in investigations, damage to property, etc.
• It means that any benefit payments for rent that we receive from other agencies might have to be paid back to them, which costs us money.
• It means that a property is not available for someone in housing need. This can affect councils if they are having to pay to keep people in temporary housing such as hotels.

• We check official documents for people who apply for housing.
• We promote an awareness about tenancy fraud to our customers and the public on our website and media campaigns.
• We encourage people to report suspicious activity to us that could mean a property is being misused.
• We investigate all reports made to us where tenancy fraud is suspected.
• We share information with other organisations to try and identify people who have given different information about themselves to us and to them.
• We have an internal tenancy audit process to identify any suspicious tenancy changes.
• We take legal action to get the property or the money we have had to return back.