Review of First Month's Rent Flexibilities Good Practice Guide

Between October 2016 and August 2017, Shelter Scotland and SFHA worked together to better understand why this might be the case and explore ways of helping housing associations to be more flexible. These learnings are captured in the good practice guide.

Both Shelter Scotland and SFHA continue to be concerned about the roll-out and impact of Universal Credit (UC) and believe it is causing issues for both tenants and housing associations. Both organisations have repeatedly called for Universal Credit to be paused to allow for the issues with the system to be fixed, however despite some recent concessions by the UK Government, this has not happened. Both organisations continue to use an evidence-based approach to build the case for improvements and lobby local and national elected members on these.