Housing support led to 450 complaints to the Ombudsman’s Office in 2023

Emergency housing support led to 450 complaints to the Ombudsman’s Office in 2023, with the body’s annual report noting that the disparity of schemes made them difficult to understand and access.

Many of the complaints and requests for clarification received by the Ombudsman’s Office over the past year have involved situations involving emergency assistance to families to pay rent and mortgage instalments.

According to the annual report on the activities of the Ombudsman’s Office, presented to Parliament today, “the majority of the numerous requests for clarification addressed to public bodies” arose from the use of two expressions in the legislation defining this support, which ultimately had “harsh consequences both in terms of the expectations of recipients and in the speed of provision of support.”

One of the expressions refers to “the total income for determining the rate” for the purposes of measuring benefits and determining the amount of income support, and the other to the use of the “effort rate”, which is “taken from the banking lexicon” and which has been found to be inadequate “since the purpose is to measure the amount of income that a person is unable to pay”.

This situation, the document says, meant that initially people whose income level exceeded theirs were denied financial support, the monthly cost of which could be no more than 200 euros.

“From the approximately 450 requests received on this topic, one could conclude that there were difficulties of various kinds: from the very beginning, there was a lack of coordination between the services involved, namely the Institute for Housing and Urban Rehabilitation (IHRU)147, the Institute for Social Welfare and the Tax and Customs Administration,” the report says.

The Ombudsman also notes that “equally obvious was the lack of prior consultation with the services regarding the ability to adapt human and IT resources to the requirements of the applicable law.”

The document, prepared by the organization headed by María Lucía Amaral, also points to the “proliferation of schemes and programs” for housing support, as well as the “constant changes” to which they are subjected, which can have a “perverse effect, harming their housing” beneficiaries and, among them, causing the most serious harm to the most vulnerable groups of the population, “since they are less informed and less autonomous in seeking and receiving clarifications.”

Given this scenario, the report adds that social care workers themselves “are unaware, given their large numbers and fluidity, of all the measures, programmes and schemes available in terms of housing support”.