As Ed Miliband suggests, there is a cost of living crisis here in the UK that means that many people are finding it more and more difficult to live with any reasonable quality of life. If you’re on housing benefit or you have a local housing allowance, you could be finding life difficult not only because you’re on an extremely tight budget, but also because you’re finding it a real challenge to find somewhere to live. Very few landlords are accepting people on DSS, and this means that even if you could afford to rent your own place, the system simply isn’t letting you. So the question arises: how can you find a landlord who accepts people on income support?
A Close Network of Friends and Family
A simple answer to this problem is that there isn’t an easy or straightforward way to find a landlord who’ll accept you if you’re on DSS, as there is a relative stigma attached to tenants of this kind even if you’re in the majority of tenants who don’t fall under the stereotype. So where can you begin your search? A good place to start would be with the people you already know. If you’re looking for a place to live, ask your friends and family if they know of landlords who accept DSS; even better, as them to ask their friends and family.
Asking Your Local Authority
If option one doesn’t quite work out, you could go to your local council authority and ask them if they know of any rental properties available through cooperative landlords. The way this works is that some landlords will register with the local council authority to help them find tenants. Not all landlords do this because they would prefer to source their own tenants, but many do. Through this method, your local council might be able to find you a new rental property, but its essential to remember that thousands of others are waiting in line too, meaning that this is by no means a guaranteed method of finding a property.
Searching Online
Although the majority of searchable property databases online are for non-DSS tenants only, some are specifically designed for DSS tenants, making your life a whole lot easier. A good place to start could be DSSMove, which offers advice on how to find a property and has a large database full of properties specifically for those on DSS. This will cut down on the amount of hassle you have to go through to find your new property, and you can even search by specific criteria such as price and area to make life even easier.
So there you have it: it might be hard as a person on DSS to locate a new home, but it isn’t impossible. You need to be patient and eventually, one of the above methods will lead you to your new landlord.
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