As a lawyer, social affairs officer Dorothee Schiwy usually chooses her words carefully, speaking factually and matter-of-factly about the problems people in Munich suffer from. When she now speaks of a “bureaucratic monster” “that fools people into believing that with housing benefit they can easily get support that will cushion the situation in difficult times,” then a lot of frustration must have built up.
The greatest trouble is yet to come: when the housing benefit reform comes into force on January 1st, which the federal government wants to bring far more people than before a state subsidy to rent. The group of beneficiaries is to be tripled. For Munich, this would mean that in the future instead of the last 4,100 households, more than 12,000 households could receive housing benefit.
But because the calculation is difficult and difficult for laypersons to understand, not even every third application of the 14,000 housing benefit applications in 2021 was successful. Since the reform arouses great expectations, experts anticipate a three to fivefold increase in the previous number of applications. This could then lead to a flood of 50,000, even up to 70,000 applications breaking through the social department. And after a long wait, the disappointment is likely to be great for many: because most applicants get nothing. The hope that housing benefit could protect low-income households from having to apply for Hartz IV benefits or social assistance has hardly been fulfilled in Munich – the rents were too high and the housing benefit too low, notes the new poverty report by the social department.
Disappointed by the housing benefit amendment: Munich’s social officer Dorothee Schiwy.
(Photo: Florian Peljak)
The processing of housing benefit applications was already a fairly unpopular occupation. A lot of administrative work, repeated changes and that for the payment of ultimately little money, measured in terms of effort, Schiwy’s predecessors complained about that. The 2020 reform made it worse, and there was also short-time work due to the pandemic, which then had to be taken into account for the housing allowance afterwards. “Many employees who were getting on their nerves have understandably reoriented themselves professionally. We had a quarter of the positions vacant for quite a while,” complains Schiwy. “The housing benefit processing is not attractive.” There are hardly any applications for the advertised positions. The social officer is now hoping to recruit staff from the health department who will no longer be needed for the “contact tracing teams” on corona infections from next year.
Normally, a training period of six months is required for housing benefit. The application alone already covers eight pages, then “wildest calculations” have to be made, for example the garage has to be excluded. Every family member must be completely controlled in terms of income. On average, the processing time for an application is four weeks, and documents are often missing.
It is not even clear when the software update will be available
There is already a backlog of housing benefit processing of ten and sometimes even twelve months. In order to have the chance to recruit new staff at all, it would have been important to postpone the implementation of the Housing Benefit Plus Act until July 1, 2023, says Schiwy. The Federal Association of Local Authority Associations had already warned of a further backlog of applications at the hearing on the draft law in view of the “immense additional effort”.
The Executive Committee of the German Association of Cities was disappointed that the federal legislature did not take up the central suggestions of the German Association of Cities to facilitate the implementation of the Housing Allowance Plus Act. This is not without consequences: “People’s expectations of getting their housing benefit paid out quickly cannot be met in many cases.” It’s not even clear when the update for the software used to process applications will be available.
Dorothee Schiwy agrees that the law is “not the big hit”, because it leads to “a lot of effort for little output”. There was already a wealth of regulations for the law, such as the housing benefit ordinance and the general administrative regulation for the implementation of the housing benefit law, and there were also a large number of ministerial processing instructions. And it doesn’t look like it’s going to decrease.
So far, 4,100 of Munich’s 843,000 households have received housing benefit, i.e. almost half a percent. In the future it should be a good 12,000, about 1.5 percent. “If you want to support the poor population, then you should have expanded the circle of beneficiaries even more.” However, the social officer finds it particularly disappointing that the proposals for simplification that she sent to Berlin were not heard. And that expectations are raised that cannot be met: “The housing benefit is not the support that gets people out of trouble.”