Douglas Council says its social housing tenants won’t be evicted from their homes if they can’t pay their rent.

The pledge comes days after The Department of Infrastructure (DoI) announced that public sector rents in the island will increase by 5% from Monday, April 7.

The changes will see tenants paying an additional £3.71 to £7.71 per week, depending on property type.

For example, a three-bedroom house will cost just over £6 more a week to renters after the change kicks-in.

Chairman of Douglas City Council’s housing committee, councillor Devon Watson said the increase means more can be spent on maintaining properties and fixing urgent issues.

‘We ourselves don’t set the rents, these are set by DoI,’ he said.

‘But we do support the measure and the reason why we do this is because past rent increases have meant that we’ve been able to double our response time for repairs.

‘They’ve gone up from 40% to 80%.

‘In terms of getting done within target and with additional increases, we can take more money and invest more in making sure properties are maintained, making sure the properties are up to standard and making sure that we can build a lot more properties.

‘While public sector rents are increasing by 5%, this is much lower than the rental increases that many people in the private sector are receiving and we are trying to provide a much, much better service than some of the worst housing that you see in the private sector, but with much fewer resources and the only way we can do that is with democratic buy in.’

According to the DoI, the rise is aimed at balancing the need to maintain and develop the island’s stock of more than 6,200 public sector properties with affordability concerns for tenants.

Tenants whose rent is covered by income-assessed Social Security benefits will have their payments automatically adjusted to reflect the increased costs, the department says.