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A quarter of a million private tenants a year are taking matters into their own hands and withholding rent from their landlords because of delays resolving emergencies like heating and electrical faults, new research reveals.

Figures from HomeServe, the home emergency specialists, show that one in three private tenants (34%) has faced a home emergency in the past 12 months, with boiler faults and other central heating problems the most common. 

Landlords who do a good job should have enhanced tax allowances, the Chancellor has been told.

The Chartered Institute of Housing is calling for better tax breaks for private landlords who keep their properties well maintained and managed. 

THE “bedroom tax” is costing millions of pounds more to implement in Scotland than it will save, the country’s council leaders have revealed.

Local government body Cosla claims the policy will cost about £58-60 million this year, which outweighs the estimated savings of £50m on the benefits bill. 

Changes to benefits payments have led to difficulties letting affordable homes and may stop hundreds more being built every year, research suggests.

Community Housing Cymru (CHC), which represents housing associations, reports problems letting 700 homes. 

This time last week, there were confident predictions that the catastrophic development of universal credit was about to claim its biggest victim to date. Not Iain Duncan Smith, the secretary of state, but Robert Devereux, his permanent secretary. Devereux, whose experience of welfare reform goes back to the early days of new Labour, knows the department well, and he's also had the now-obligatory spell outside the department and outside Whitehall.

But the huge process of introducing a live system that folds six different in-work benefits into one that keeps up with a claimant's circumstances week by week has lurched from crisis to crisis. In September, the National Audit Office (again) raised serious concerns. The public accounts committee followed up with evidence sessions with the main players. Its report, it was anticipated, would lead to Devereux's swift departure. 

Ahead of an Opposition Day Debate in the House of Commons, charity Citizens Advice has warned that changes to Housing Benefit are “simply creating more problems”.

The Housing Benefit reform, which came into effect in April this year, is aiming to cut costs by restricting the size of accommodation a family can receive Housing Benefit for. 

Housing associations say change to benefit rules means tenants cannot afford to rent three-bed maisonettes.

Three-bedroom homes are being condemned to demolition by housing associations because the coalition's bedroom tax has made them too expensive for tenants to live in, the Observer can reveal. 

NEARLY 200 people have signed a petition calling for the ‘bedroom tax’ to be scrapped – with protestors urging Councils to debate the issue.

Last Thursday, an organised protest group set up in Angel Place to ask passers-by if they would add their support to the campaign. 

The lack of affordable housing is adding to the country's cost of living crisis with private rents in England forecast to rise another 44% by 2020.

And research carried out on behalf of the National Housing Federation shows that more and more parents are helping their children to pay their rent. 

Seven months after the introduction of the so-called ‘bedroom tax’ two thirds of council house tenants affected are behind with rent, a Freedom of Information request has found.

Rent arrears have risen by £693,202 to £4,182,026 since the welfare reform’s introduction in April. It cuts housing benefit by an average £14 per week to council and housing association tenants deemed to have ‘spare’ bedrooms.