Yes – although not necessarily only from the person’s disability benefits
Very simply, as long as the deputy is a deputy for finance and property, the deputy can sign the lodger agreement as deputy, and it is binding as a matter of contract. That enables the landlord to take the rent and bills from the person, under the MCA. It must be a reasonable rent. It is then Housing Costs for the purposes of charging and must be disregarded from income. So it should be taken from the person’s ESA (support group) or UC, not their disability benefits. It’s not DRE.
The bills are not disability-related expenditure as a further disregard, unless or until they are clearly BIGGER than average for the size of house and occupancy, by dint of disability. The basic bills, including one’s board, are provided for in the MIG, ie already disregarded. So in theory a person’s MIG enables them to pay their share of the bills.
To those of you who say surely this cannot be done at all, and that your council does not allow it, three things to bear in mind:
The Wychavon housing benefit case law shows that it CAN be done (in that case the person was living over a garage in an annex owned by their parents) and that even where the contract is not signed by a deputy, (the father was not the deputy when the contract was first signed) it can still lead to a claim for HB, where there is no exclusion in play.
Relying on sections 7 and 8 MCA are another way of doing it, but we prefer the above contractual route, because housing is not goods or services, and that is what the doctrine of ‘necessaries’, which was made concrete by these sections in the MCA, was all about.
And a lodger agreement for the accommodation cannot be ignored – the deputy is agent for the individual, and also the landlord, but that is ok. It is not just a debt, which COULD be ignored for charging purposes, but a debt for which there is a mandatory housing costs disregard from income.
If you tried to put a contribution towards the bills in the lodger agreement we think that there’d be pushback, but you can always try.
The same goes for someone with a power of attorney for finance and property as for a deputy – but it is less clear for an appointee, because an appointee is not an agent for the client’s contracts, only for the spending of the money. But in that scenario, by analogy with Wychavon, the ‘necessaries’ argument may be enough and then it would not matter that the contract was not binding on account of being signed by an appointee only.
If you were trying to get HB for the lodger agreement, it would still count as eligible for HB in principle, as it’s a charge for living somewhere, but it would be another matter altogether in terms of likelihood of refusal because of the rule about no HB for people renting from their parent for living in their own parent’s house.