In the long-running dispute over the limits of reasonable housing costs for social welfare recipients in the Werra-Meißner district, the job center has suffered another defeat before the Kassel Social Court. In three judgments published on November 20, 2020 (case numbers: S 2 AS 147/17, S 2 AS 266/17, and S 2 AS 271/17), the court's second chamber ruled that a housing market survey report from 2014, submitted by the job center, remained inconclusive and therefore inapplicable even after a revision in 2019. The job center was thus ordered to grant the plaintiffs the actual housing costs of €410.00 per month.
The plaintiffs, a man now 69 years old and his son now 26, filed a lawsuit because the job center granted them €72.72 less per month for housing costs than their rent. The job center justified the reduction with an expert opinion from the company Analyse und Konzepte, dated March 2014, which had established the limits for reasonable housing costs in the Werra-Meißner district based on supposedly valid surveys from 2013. Following a landmark ruling by the Federal Social Court, the job center attempted to refute the expert opinion with a corrective report in 2019 during the course of the legal proceedings.
The Kassel Social Court now also considers this "improvement" to be inconclusive. The comparison area used in the expert report was not accurately defined in the first place. This had led to the analysis and concept itself recommending that the values in Hessisch Lichtenau and Sontra be elevated above the values in Witzenhausen and Eschwege, contrary to reality. The court concluded that the data basis is therefore insufficient overall to guarantee a uniform approach for determining the limits of reasonableness throughout the entire expert report.
“The figures in the 2014 report by the company Analyse und Konzept were absurdly low even when they were published, and there was and still is hardly any rentable housing in the Werra-Meißner district at the calculated rents,” says attorney Sven Adam, who represents the plaintiffs, expressing his frustration with the job center's continued defense of the report. “It is absurd that the Werra-Meißner district commissioned Analyse und Konzepte from Hamburg once again to prepare a new report for the current benefit approvals. This report from 2018 also suffers from the same structural flaws and is likewise the subject of various legal proceedings,” Adam continues.
One of the court's judgments of November 20, 2020 (Case No.: S 2 AS 271/17) is included as an example in the appendix to this communication.
For further questions, please contact attorney Sven Adam using the contact details provided.
