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It's no surprise that housing associations' arrears are worse than councils (9 May, pages 5, 13 and 28).

Councils deduct all housing benefit at source, whereas housing associations have to collect it from the tenant or get it paid directly by agreement.

The government's solution to this problem – to abolish all housing benefit direct payments – will not, as your editorial suggests, make the problem go away. It will do the opposite: arrears will spiral.

Most local authority computer systems fail to transfer data to us properly. I'm informed by a senior housing benefit officer in one of our partner boroughs that software houses are being told by civil servants not to spend time on sorting this out because direct housing benefit is going to be abolished. Has anyone told the Audit Commission?

At St Pancras & Humanist our arrears have gone down this year as a result of hard work by our staff, an excellent housing benefit team at Camden council and some good work by our outsourced arrears contractor JSS Pinnacle. In the next couple of months we are introducing a benefits advice service and launching our version of SP&H Gold, with a range of incentives for tenants to pay their rent on time.

But abolition of direct housing benefit payments and the ongoing problems with e-commerce links threatens to reverse this progress.