Equifax has launched a tenancy verification service designed to make it easier for housing providers to identify tenancy fraud, reduce the costs of housing misuse and improve the collection of arrears.
Housing tenancy fraud includes the unauthorised subletting of a property for profit, using false information in a housing application to gain a tenancy, and wrongful tenancy where a property is no longer occupied by the original tenant.
Equifax Tenancy Verification provides a review of all housing stock, verifying bona fide residencies and identifying cases with anomalies which need further investigation. This risk assessment tool, helping to differentiate between high-risk and genuine cases, enables housing providers to allocate appropriate resources and take proportionate actions in response to suspected frauds.
The Equifax databases enable address matching and cleansing of tenant records, confirming current place of residence as well as highlighting changes in personal circumstances. This then provides the evidence to support the investigation of simple cases, such as a resident living at another address, deceased tenants or the presence of unauthorised residents at an address.
The Audit Commission considers that tenancy fraud is the largest category of its kind across local government, with an estimated 50,000 homes currently occupied fraudulently. This is supported by the National Fraud Authority which has estimated that tenancy fraud costs housing associations and local authorities at least £900 million each year. A spokesman for the National Fraud Authority recently said, “We call on all local authorities [and housing providers] to implement a thorough strategy to detect and prevent housing tenancy fraud, using identified best practice including the use of credit reference data.”
Carly Newbury from Equifax Public Sector said, “With around two million families waiting for housing, and costing nearly £1 billion a year in the process, housing tenancy fraud needs to be tackled in a focused and forthright manner.
“Our new system can help to reduce the cost of housing tenancy misuse as well as the costs of providing temporary accommodation – two major drains on public sector resources.”
