Newsletter Archive

If you run supported or specialist housing, you already know the phrase that makes auditors lean in: Intensive Housing Management. Get it right and you protect fragile tenancies, calm risky buildings, and lawfully recover the real cost of keeping people safely housed. Get it wrong and you invite restriction, clawback, or months of back-and-forth over charges that were never eligible in the first place. This newsletter is a practical field guide to drawing that line with confidence—what does count as IHM, what doesn’t, and how to evidence the difference so it survives scrutiny from councils, auditors and tribunals.

Our starting point is simple and defensible: IHM is landlord-side housing management, necessary for occupation and tenancy sustainment in higher-risk schemes. It is not care. It is not support. It is not a rebrand of core landlord functions like repairs, voids or cyclical compliance. The distinction lives in the purpose of the task (tenancy/estate safety), who delivers it (by or for the landlord), and whether there is auditable evidence (clear logs, time, role, outcome). When those three pillars are present, IHM charges tend to pass; when any of them wobble—especially evidence—charges fall over.

Inside, we map the auditor’s lens and show you exactly what they look for: a crisp task taxonomy; bottom-up costing tied to real productive hours; a clean separation from support funding; and an evidence chain that a stranger could follow from rota → log → action → tenancy outcome. You’ll get a “survives vs fails” task table, a build-once evidence pack checklist, and micro-templates you can paste straight into policies and daily logs. We’ve also included the classic council challenge lines (“this looks like support”, “security isn’t eligible”, “send all HR/DBS”) with short, lawful rebuttals that steer the conversation back to entitlement and proportionality.

This isn’t about inflating costs; it’s about making visible the work that actually keeps people housed—guest policy enforcement, ASB prevention, nightly tenancy-safety checks, and the thousand small interventions that stop a building unravelling. By the end, you’ll have a defensible IHM model you can price, evidence and explain in two pages—so when the audit comes, you spend less time arguing semantics and more time sustaining the homes that depend on you.

If you work in supported exempt accommodation, you’ve probably felt the tug-of-war that starts the moment a council emails a sprawling “Reg 86” request. One month on the clock; twenty-odd items demanded—many of them nothing to do with deciding entitlement. This newsletter cuts through that noise. Regulation 86 is simple in law and often muddled in practice: it empowers authorities to ask for information reasonably required to determine entitlement or continuing entitlement to Housing Benefit. It does not authorise open-ended audits of your organisation, your HR files, or other residents’ records. Getting that boundary right is the difference between a clean award and weeks of avoidable delay, suspension, or refusal.

What follows gives you a working playbook. First, we translate the regulation into plain English and show how Upper Tribunal commentary confines Reg 86 to the entitlement question. Then we separate what is usually reasonable (tenancy, eligible rent logic, category evidence, material income details) from what isn’t (bulk third-party notes, generic safeguarding packs, “send everything” trawls). You’ll see the most common overreach patterns—line by line—and a lawful counter for each, grounded in proportionality and data-minimisation.

Because speed matters, we include three copy-ready templates: Narrow the Scope, Partial Compliance + Extension, and Adverse Inference – Pre-Emption. Use them to reframe requests around decision points, offer proportionate alternatives, and secure time where redaction or collation is genuinely needed. There’s also a compact “Fast Evidence Pack” checklist so you can deliver exactly what’s necessary, first time.
 

The aim isn’t confrontation; it’s clarity. Councils need sufficient information to pay the right benefit. Providers need predictable, defensible processes that protect residents’ data and staff time. This guide helps you meet both: respond quickly, stay within the law’s lane, and keep entitlement moving without volunteering your entire filing cabinet.