Thursday, 28 August 2008
Local Housing Allowance Housing & Council Tax Benefits - FAQ Benefits FraudAs well as the people who claim Housing Benefit and Council Tax Benefit, we also see landlords who receive direct payment of Housing Benefit as our customers. We aim to work with you to ensure you receive Housing Benefit payments promptly and to minimise overpayments.
In return, we ask that you respect our obligation to your tenants to keep the information they give us confidential.
Landlords often contact us for information about their tenant's Housing Benefit. Under the Social Security Fraud Act, it is a criminal offence for a member of staff to disclose personal information to a third party about someone claiming Housing Benefit without that person's consent. Our staff are personally liable if they breach this.
If we pay Housing Benefit to you, we will write and tell you how much we will pay you and the date we have paid benefit from.
If we make all Housing Benefit payments to you, we will also write and tell you when the award is changed or stopped. If we have stopped your tenant's benefit, we will give you as much information as the law allows about why their benefit has been stopped. But, we cannot, for example, give you your tenant's forwarding address if they have moved.
Part 12 of our Housing Benefit claim form allows the tenant to name you as someone with whom we can discuss their claim. Your tenant can also give us permission to discuss the progress of their claim with you on form HCTB1 which they obtain from Social Security. If your tenant has given his/her permission, we will tell you that they have claimed benefit and whether or not we have dealt with the claim. If we cannot deal with the claim because we need information from you, such as rent proof, we will tell you this. But, we cannot let you have any information which we think your tenant would not want us to give, for example, details of their income and savings.
Before we give you any information, we will ask you for your 'landlord number'. This number is shown on any letters we send you about your tenant's benefit. The number is the same for all your tenants.
We will keep information we hold about you and your tenants confidential. However, the law allows us to share information with other departments and organisations to:
For example, by law, we have to give information to the Inland Revenue about Housing Benefit we pay to you for your tenants.
From 7 April 2008, if a tenant makes a new claim for Housing Benefit or changes their address, their Housing Benefit will usually be assessed under the Local Housing Allowance rules. Use the link entitled ‘Local Housing Allowance’ in the ‘More Information’ column on the left for more details about this.
Under the Local Housing Allowance rules, we will normally have to pay your tenant's Housing Benefit to them. In certain circumstances, we can pay your tenant's Housing Benefit to you. For more information about Local Housing Allowance, including the circumstances when we can pay your tenant's Housing Benefit to you, see our Local Housing Allowance Fact Sheet for Landlords. Use the link entitled ‘Local Housing Allowance’ in the ‘More Information’ column on the left to get to this Fact Sheet.
If your tenant's claim for Housing Benefit is not affected by the Local Housing Allowance rules, they can still ask for their benefit to paid to you on their behalf. We will normally pay Housing Benefit to you in the following circumstances:
We can pay Housing Benefit by cheque or direct into your bank account (by BACS). We prefer to pay you by BACS because this is much quicker and more secure.
Where we are paying Housing Benefit directly to you and you have several tenants, we can pay you the benefit for all the tenants in one payment. But we will only do this if you are willing to pay back any amounts overpaid quickly.
If you find out about any change that might affect your tenant's Housing Benefit, you must tell us straight away. For example, you must tell us if:
Landlords also have an important role to play in our fight against benefits fraud. If you write and tell us that you suspect your tenant is committing benefit fraud, and we later prove this, we will not ask you to pay back any overpaid Housing Benefit. But, we must be satisfied that you did not contribute to the overpayment, or collude with your tenant in any way to cause the overpayment.
If we are paying your tenant's Housing Benefit to you and we pay you too much, we will probably ask you to pay it back. If you do not agree with this, you should get in touch with us when you get our letter telling you we will pay the Housing Benefit to you and ask us to pay your tenant instead.
If we pay you too much Housing Benefit, we will write to you about this. We would appreciate it if you would pay the money back to us quickly. Under the 1997 Fraud Act, we have the right to take Housing Benefit you have been overpaid from any future payments we make to you. This means we can take amounts overpaid for one tenant from another tenant's Housing Benefit. We use this way of recovering the overpayment as a last resort and would prefer that you pay back the money to us directly.
