Landlord Section – Overpayments

How to avoid overpayments occurring

Overpayments occur for a number of reasons, the most common are:

  • You or your tenant providing the Council with incorrect information
  • You or your tenant failing to disclose a relevant change in circumstances
  • Delays in deciding a relevant change in circumstance due to information being supplied late
  • Mistakes made in deciding a claim.

It is therefore very important that you tell us about any changes in the claimant’s circumstances that might affect their benefit, whether or not you think the claimant might already have told us and to do so as quickly as possible. The information you are obliged to inform the Council about are:

  • If the claimant moves out
  • If there is a change in the membership of the household – someone moves in or out
  • If you have changed the amount of rent or services charged, or you have changed the terms of the tenancy agreement
  • If you suspect the claimant is committing benefit fraud – you are receiving more benefit than you think the claimant ought to be entitled to.

When an overpayment occurs

In most cases the Council will seek to recover any overpayment that has arisen. The exception to this is if the overpayment resulted from an error we or another Government department made, which you or your tenant could not reasonably have known to have occurred.

If we have overpaid you we are statutorily required to write to you and tell you:

  • Why the overpayment has arisen (we will not divulge your claimant’s personal circumstances)
  • How much you have been overpaid
  • The period over which the overpayment accrued
  • Whether we are going to recover the overpayment
  • How we will recover the overpayment.

How do we recover an overpayment?

If your tenant is still entitled to some Housing Benefit we will seek to recover an amount of money from their benefit entitlement each week until the overpayment is cleared. The Government sets standard overpayment recovery rates dependent upon your tenant’s income circumstances so as not to unduly disadvantage them whilst we recover an overpayment, accordingly large overpayments for people on very low incomes may take many years to recover.

If your tenant is no longer entitled to Housing Benefit and we decide to recover the overpayment from you (which usually means you we paid you your tenant’s Housing Benefit), we will send you an invoice for the amount overpaid. You then have the choice to clear the invoice in one payment within the time limit set, or to make an arrangement with us to clear the debt over a longer of time.

If you are a landlord with multiple tenants we may be able to recover the overpayment from the Housing Benefit we pay you in respect of your other tenants. If we do this you cannot seek to offset the amount deducted by increasing the rents of your remaining tenants, in other words, you must credit each tenant’s rent account with the full of benefit we have paid in their respect.

What do I do if I disagree with your decision?

If you do not agree with our decision to recover the overpayment from you, you can appeal against the decision within one calendar month of receiving the notification telling you that an overpayment has occurred and the recovery action we intend to take. If we receive your appeal outside of the one calendar month period we may not be able to look at your appeal.

If you do appeal against our decision we will cease any planned recovery action until your appeal has been fully dealt with.

Please review our Appeals subsection within the dedicated landlord section.

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