SOME of the region’s poorest people are waiting months for benefits claims to be processed, according to a councillor who has called for a review of the system.

Durham County Council is centralising tens of thousands of housing benefit records from the boroughs and districts that formed the merged council in April 2009.

The council has already apologised for changing payment days for many Teesdale and Wear Valley claimants without warning, leaving them unable to pay their rent on time.

However, Councillor Mark Wilkes said problems with the new system went far deeper than the council was letting on and has referred the issue to the council’s scrutiny committee.

He said: “It is taking up to three months to process new claims, and even simple things like a change of address are taking longer than the council’s own targets.

“This means that, for example, landlords are not being paid for months and residents are waiting far too long for a variety of other claims to be dealt with.”

Coun Wilkes said officers were working hard to resolve the issue, but that there were early reports they were missing targets. The council said 1,700 new claims remained outstanding, with a further 2,000 outstanding as the council awaits information it has requested from the claimants.

Officials would not comment on concerns that some people were being threatened with eviction because of delays and said the vast majority of the backlog was from the past two months.

Ian Ferguson, the council’s revenues and benefits manager, said the problem was caused by its centralising project and an increase of 10,000 new claimants over the past three years.

He said lessons had been learnt during the Teesdale and Wear Valley switch that would be heeded as the council merged information from former councils in Easington, Sedgefield, Durham, Derwentside and Chester-le- Street.

He said the result would be a more efficient system that would offer claimants online access to their claims.

He said: “We are going through a big change. This is one of the biggest conversions for this particular service that has happened in the country.

“We are having to take time out and we have got this big workload, so we have got backlogs in terms of we are not assessing claims as quickly as we would like and as we would normally do.”