Report on the Housing Benefit Under-Occupation Charge to the Welfare Reform Committee of the Scottish Parliament.
The research was commissioned to give a deeper understanding of scale and the depth of those affected (at Scottish and local authority level) by the under-occupation charge and the capacity of the system to meet down-sizing demand via one bed vacancies coming forward in a given year (a rough proxy for capacity).
Preliminary investigation suggested that such data either does not exist or is not recorded in a way that readily matches the recent COSLA survey data which consists of all affected households by local authority area. Instead the research provides a number of partial estimates from various data sources as well as other forms of evidence in order to provide insights into these questions.