The Göttingen district has suffered another legal defeat in its dispute over the amount of housing costs for recipients of social benefits. In two cases (file numbers: L 6 AS 467/17 and L 6 AS 468/17), the Lower Saxony-Bremen State Social Court (LSG) ruled that the district lacked a coherent concept for surveying the Göttingen rental housing market in 2016. The LSG thus rejected the district's appeals in both cases against judgments issued by the Hildesheim Social Court on May 10, 2017 (file numbers: S 39 AS 187/16 and S 39 AS 999/16), in which the district had been ordered to pay an additional €66.01 per month, totaling €792.12, to a 58-year-old woman from Göttingen.
The dispute centered on whether an expert opinion from 2012 by the Hamburg-based firm Analyse und Konzepte, along with an update from 2014, had been prepared in accordance with the Federal Social Court's guidelines for determining reasonable limits for housing costs. The Social Court had already criticized the expert opinion's definition of the comparison area, in which Göttingen, together with Bovenden and Rosdorf, had been declared a single, unified living space. However, the State Social Court's main criticism in the oral hearing of April 2, 2019, was the lack of representativeness of the existing rent data collected. These data had been gathered by Analyse und Konzepte predominantly from individual large landlords and supplemented with data sets from the Job Center itself.
“It goes without saying that data primarily from a few large landlords and the job center itself cannot provide a representative picture of the Göttingen housing market. We have been criticizing for years that the report by the company Analyse und Konzepte, among others, is based on data that was not collected representatively, and that the limits for reasonable rent were therefore artificially lowered,” explains attorney Sven Adam, who represents the plaintiff, highlighting one of the many criticisms of the report. “After the judgment becomes legally binding, the plaintiff will receive a substantial back payment plus interest. However, others have lost their homes due to the county's incorrect limits for reasonable rent,” Adam says, referring to the consequences of the county's practice, criticized for years as unlawful, of commissioning privately organized companies to conduct housing market surveys.
The Higher Social Court (LSG) did not grant leave to appeal the judgment. Therefore, after receiving the written grounds for the judgment, the district can only file a complaint against the refusal of leave to appeal with the Federal Social Court as a legal remedy against the judgment.
For further questions, please contact attorney Sven Adam using the contact details provided.
The decision of the Hildesheim Social Court in the first instance dated 10 May 2017 under file number: S 39 AS 187/16 can be found here.
http://www.anwaltskanzlei-adam.de/index.php?id=102,1257,0,0,1,0
