A COUNCIL under fire for the length of time it takes to deal with housing benefit is set to be inspected by the Benefit Fraud Inspectorate.

Rossendale Borough Council will be among 14 other authorities to receive a visit from inspectors who will be reporting to the Department for Work and Pensions.

Councils who are taking longer than 80 days to process housing benefits claims have been identified for assessment.

The BFI will make detailed recommendations during the inspections to improve claim processing times for the poorer performing councils, whose benefits services were identified as poor or fair in the Comprehensive Performance Assessment programme.

According to last year's figures, the average time to process a new claim in Rossendale is 90 days, compared to a national average of 51 days, and 41 days by top-performing authorities.

This has led to claims that people are facing eviction because they cannot pay rents, while other people have had threats of court action from the council.

The council is receiving support to turn things around with help from the BFI's successful Performance Improvement Action Team and also received extra Government cash of £268,000.

Last year the section dealt with more than 50,000 items of mail and there were 14,500 housing benefit applications.

Additional staff from other benefit areas have also been drafted in to help ease the problems and get rid of the backlog.

Lynn Hurrell, director of housing management services at Rossendale Borough Council, said: "The inspectorate reviews the figures from 2002-2003 which showed the council was taking an average of 88.5 days to process housing benefit claims.

"From the beginning of December 2003 that figure has been reduced to 64.3 days, so we are moving in the right direction. In addition to this from 2002-2003 we had a backlog of 8,500 items of un-opened mail, as of January 20 we had 330 which has been achieved with the help of government funding which has been spent on training staff.

"The CPA report said that we had made improvements but we still had some way to go, which we all recognise.

"The BFI will produce a report with a framework and recommendations for us to work towards with the council producing an action plan of how we plan to take things forward."