Tenant overcharged for 10 years
A sheltered housing tenant is to be paid back thousands of pounds in rent after his council landlords overcharged him for more than 10 years.
The Local Government Ombudsman has told Oxford City Council to pay the man, who has not been named, £3,600 in overpaid rent and another £1,000 compensation.
The council agreed to the pay-out, and to reimbursing other residents in the block who might have been overcharged.
The man complained that its charging system had been wrongly applied.
The ombudsman investigated and, in a report published on Thursday, found maladministration causing injustice.
He said the tenant should be compensated "for his time, trouble and frustration in pursuing his complaint".
The council is now to review the way it brings in changes to its rent account and to carry out an internal audit to make sure "further financial errors affecting tenants do not persist".
The tenant originally complained that the council had overcharged him for gas consumption from April 2002 and had wrongly applied its rent charging system because his home had not been modernised.
The ombudsman found that the man had not been overcharged for gas but that the council had not properly implemented its system for his block of sheltered flats.
As a result, he had been overcharged for more than a decade.
Source: The BBC (08/06/2006)
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