I have recently had problems with housing benefit assessment of assured private tenants where the rent assessment committee have registered a rent.
The LA authority when referring the case to the Rent Service have registered a differnt rent to that of the panel, which at times has been to the detriment of the client. The local authroity has stated that " rent assessment committee decisions have no bearing on the assessment of housing benefit in any way".

i want to know whether this is correct as what is the point of registring a rent if the Rent officer is not going to take it seriously. i thought a rent assessment panel would have more powers and jurisdiction over a rent officer's decision.

The rent assessment panel used to take precedence over the rent officer determination in the past, but the law was changed some time ago.

If your clients HB is assessed under the old reg 11 then you have a strong argumentt that the LA has no grounds to restrict the rent as they have no real evidence to show that it is unreasonable. An appeal to the Tribunal in this case should be relativley straightforward.

If your clients are being assessed under the new regulation 11 you are in very difficult territory as there is no right of appeal if the matter to be decided rests on the rent officers determination.

In R on the application of Cumpsty v Rent Officer Service 8 November 2002 QBD, Pritchard J ruled against an HRA challenge under Art 6 and held that the rent officer was sufficiently independent of the LA so as to enable the process to comply with Art 6 .

The R/O in Cumpsty had given a detailed expalanation of the data used in the assesment, but I suggest that rent officers are usually no so thorough and an Article 6 challenge would succeed in those circumstances.

Short of a JR involving the rent officer, you could try getting the case before a Tribunal or a commissioner using an Art 6 argument, particularrly if you have a rent assessment panel determination that is very different from that of the rent officer.

You can also argue that the rent assesment panel should be looking at substantially the same data and assessing on substantially the same criteria to that of the rent officer, and that in other fields eg fair rents, the rent assesment panel is a superior appeal body overseeing the rent officer. (This would again support and Art 6 challenge)

thanks to stainsby, the cumpsty judgment can now be downloaded here -

http://www.rightsnet.org.uk/pdfs/Cumpsty_v_Rent_Service.pdf