Housing benefit payments - Park homes
Case reference FOI2026/01241
Received 27 May 2026
Published 22 June 2026
Request
This is a request under the Freedom of Information Act. I am seeking information about housing benefit payments where the claimant is living in a static caravan or park home.
Q1: Can you tell me how many of your housing benefit claimants live in this type of accommodation and how much the council paid out in housing benefit for their homes in each of the last five years?
Q2: Also how many housing benefit claimants did you have in total in each of these years - so I can understand the proportion that lived in static caravans/park homes?
Q3: Lastly, is it possible to also identify how much was paid (directly or indirectly) to each of the three landlords of this type of accommodation who received the largest sums? Please let me know if this request needs to be adapted in order to enable you to be able to respond. If there is an issue with the time limit, please prioritise Qs 1 and 2.
Response
This is a request under the Freedom of Information Act.
I am seeking information about housing benefit payments where the claimant is living in a static caravan or park home.
Q1: Can you tell me how many of your housing benefit claimants live in this type of accommodation and how much the council paid out in housing benefit for their homes in each of the last five years?
Q2: Also how many housing benefit claimants did you have in total in each of these years - so I can understand the proportion that lived in static caravans/park homes?
Q3: Lastly, is it possible to also identify how much was paid (directly or indirectly) to each of the three landlords of this type of accommodation who received the largest sums?
Please let me know if this request needs to be adapted in order to enable you to be able to respond. If there is an issue with the time limit, please prioritise Qs 1 and 2.
A: The answers to Q1 and Q3 are not held in a form that would enable it to be located, retrieved and extracted within the Appropriate Time Limit which equates to 18 hours as defined by the Freedom of Information and Data Protection (Appropriate Limits and Fees) Regulations 2004.
Our electronic reporting systems are unable to run a report for this information. To ascertain the data requested officers would need to manually check files for this information. Our software does not distinguish Housing Benefit awards by property type and so would require us to review every live case manually to establish if it was a static caravan or park home. We currently have approx. 3,300 live Housing Benefit cases and this would be higher for previous years. It would take approximately 2 minutes to check each case for this information.
This would at a conservative estimate take at least 110 hours to complete for each year. Where the Limit is exceeded Public Authorities are not obliged to supply the information requested by virtue of S12 of the Act. Please take this letter as a refusal notice under S17 of the Act.
As you have requested that the team prirotise Q2 in the event of the request exceeding the limit, please see the answer to this question below:
2021-22 – 5,901
2022-23 - 5,481
2023-24 – 5,135
2024-25 – 4,132
2025-26 – 3,275
Documents
This is Herefordshire Council's response to a freedom of information (FOI) or environmental information regulations (EIR) request.
You can browse our other responses or make a new FOI request.