Housing benefit: payment can be delayed by months – job centers fear collapse
Created: 12/16/2022, 9:38 am
By: Lisa Mayerhofer
After a reform of the traffic light government, hundreds of thousands of additional households will be able to receive housing benefits for the first time at the beginning of 2023.
But the municipalities are already overwhelmed.
Wiesbaden – At the end of last year, almost 600,000 households in Germany received housing benefit.
This corresponded to 1.5 percent of all private main residence households, as reported by the Federal Statistical Office in Wiesbaden in December.
This should change fundamentally after a reform of the traffic light government in the coming year:
Hundreds of thousands of additional households will then be able to receive housing benefit for the first time.
The government rent subsidy is intended to relieve households that do not receive social benefits but still have little money in view of the high energy prices.
These include people with a small pension or low earners.
In addition, the housing benefit should increase to an average of 370 euros per month.
Payment of housing benefit could be delayed for months
In other words: from 2023, many more people will suddenly be entitled to housing benefit than before - and they urgently need the money because of high inflation and energy costs.
At the same time, however, there is a shortage of staff in the responsible authorities, warn municipalities and states that are supposed to be responsible for housing benefit.
They expect months of delays in the payout.
"It already takes three to six months to process an application for housing benefit," said Gerd Landsberg, general manager of the German Association of Towns and Municipalities, in the
picture
at the end of November.
"This will expand significantly."
Landsberg told
Welt am Sonntag that the implementation of the law threatened "a collapse" of the housing benefit system well into the coming year.
The housing benefit offices could not even be adequately equipped with qualified specialist staff until January.
According to a survey by the newspaper among the ten largest German cities, individual municipalities are currently expecting two and a half to five times as many applications as before.
Do the job centers have to bear the brunt of the difficulties with the housing benefit reform?
A spokeswoman for Federal Building Minister Klara Geywitz (SPD), on the other hand, referred to planned administrative simplifications that should make it easier to pay out the housing benefit.
By the end of June 2023, the obligation of the job center to immediately refer people to the housing benefit authority who have previously received Hartz IV or social assistance will be suspended.
This is intended to avoid an application or processing backlog, so that decisions can be made quickly on applications from so-called changers.
But all of this is now leading to the fact that the job centers, which have already been overburdened by the introduction of the citizens' allowance, are afraid that the burdens there will also be too great.
The Spokesperson's Council of the federal job center network warns of this in a letter that was sent to the Federal Ministry of Labor, among others, and is available to the
time
.
The spokesman council therefore fears that the job centers will have to bear the brunt of the difficulties with the housing benefit reform.
If those affected had to wait months for housing benefit, many could apply for interim citizen benefit, so the fear.
Then there are the people who need social benefits because of high inflation and energy costs, and the refugees from Ukraine.
These and other factors could "take the performance of the job centers to their absolute limits and beyond," according to the spokesman's council, according to
Zeit
.
It would then no longer be possible to guarantee “prompt and reliable task completion”.
With material from the dpa
