An overpayment of housing benefit occurs when your tenant's circumstances have changed and there is a delay in telling us. If they are entitled to less benefit as a result of the change they will need to repay the amount that they have been paid but are no longer entitled to.
If your tenant has an overpayment that they have to repay, we will usually recover the overpayment from their ongoing housing benefit payments.
If the benefit is paid directly to you then we will tell you how much will be deducted from the benefit that we send to you on your payment schedules. Your tenant will have to make up these payments to you themselves. The amount taken from your tenant's benefit will vary according to their individual circumstances.
If you receive Housing Benefit directly in respect of your tenant, then you will both be notified of any overpayments that occur as they may be legally recoverable from either of you. In most cases, we will seek to recover from the tenant as the overpayment has arisen because his personal circumstances have changed. There are occasions where we consider the landlord to be liable for the overpayment. An example of this would be where we would seek to recover an overpayment from the landlord would be if a tenant has moved and we consider that it was reasonable for the landlord to know of the move.
If you don't repay an overpayment which we have demanded, we may recover the overpayment from future direct payments of benefit for other tenants. We are reluctant to recover payments in this way, but will not hesitate to do so if we feel that there is no alternative.
If we invoke these powers (Social Security Administration Act 1997 Section 16), it means that each tenant for whom Housing Benefit is being paid will have their direct payment reduced by the amount of the overpayments we are collecting. You must reduce each of these tenant's rent liability by the full value of the deduction, and you cannot recover the reduction by treating them as rent arrears.
A landlord can only ask for these decisions to be reconsidered:
- whether or not to pay them direct
- whether any overpayment is recoverable from them
If you think that we should recover an overpayment from your tenant instead of you, you can write to us within a month of our decision giving your reasons why and we will review our decision from whom to recover.
