When I started looking into the issues around Discretionary Housing payments I made a FoIA request for information including the total number of claims each year and the number of successful claims.

The idea was that I could work out the success rates of applications and see how it related to the ever declining government grant for DHPs.

NCC have provided the figures for successful claims but have claimed that providing the TOTAL NUMBER OF CLAIMS would cost a disproportionate amount of money, despite the fact that they could provide 18 months worth of these figures for an obscure council committee back in 2006.

Whats more, we have the expenditure figures and there have calculated an estimate of the amount of money lost to the Nottingham economy by the mismanagement of DHPs. This estimate is based on a comparison of actual expenditure to the amount of government grant if it had been increased in line with inflation each year.

The amount lost by this estimate is over £500k.

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 http://ncclols.blogspot.com/2009/03/discretionary-housing-payments-still.html