People who came to our Frome Renting Alliance event at the Cheese and Grain last month were given an insight into the local housing picture by Iona Fitzgerald from Citizens Advice Mendip. Before the discussion, Iona gave an interesting presentation and some of the information gives us a good picture into the problems people are experiencing.
Iona said that in the last 12 months, Citizens Advice Mendip advisers helped 4,081 clients and that around 600 of these approached CA with housing as their main issue – 16% or 1 in 6 clients. The reasons were complex and many overlapped with debt problems but the table below gives the detail on the figures for people approaching Citizens Advice Mendip with Private Rental problems.
People on Universal Credit with a housing payment experience a big difference between the amount paid by UC and the rent being charged by private landlords on the open market. www.home.co.uk shows the current rental picture in Frome like this:
| No. of properties | Average rent | Median Rent | |
| 1 bedroom | 1 | £630 | £630 |
| 2 bedrooms | 4 | £988 | £950 |
| 3 bedrooms | 5 | £1300 | £1200 |
| 4 bedrooms | 4 | £1550 | £1600 |
Because many people who have problems paying their rent also have other debt issues, Citizens Advice is a great resource. They have a debt and budgeting project and can often arrange for people’s debts to be reduced or made easier to manage. Iona was able to give case studies on how people have been helped out of debt and urged anyone with debt problems to approach them for free and confidential advice. https://www.citizensadvicemendip.org.uk/