shawn
editorial director, rightsnet
Member since
28th Jul 2005
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HB Overpayments Manual - from HBHelp
Mon 25-Feb-08 09:34 AM |
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ADVERTISEMENT
HB Overpayments Manual - a practical guide for social landlords who are asked to repay housing benefit overpayments, by Chris Smith of HB Help
The rules on overpayments are in a state of constant change. Bad practice by councils in dealing with overpayments is common. Many housing organisations face huge bills for overpayments.
To help you deal with all this I have published an overpayments manual. The main part of the manual aims to be a simple guide to dealing with overpayments you are asked to repay. Appendices give you detailed information on overpayment law and practice, how to challenge decisions and important test cases. There are also some useful draft letters.
Issues covered include -
- why councils often get things wrong;
- common council errors and how to spot them;
- what information notifications of overpayments must give;
- how to get more information about the overpayment without wasting huge amounts of time;
- how to check if there really has been a recoverable overpayment of the amount requested;
- offsetting actual entitlement against the overpayment
- rules about how undeclared savings and capital must be treated;
- when recovery cannot be made from the landlord;
- how to influence the council to recover from the appropriate person;
- how to deal with backlogs of overpayment requests;
- how to challenge decisions and bad practice using the revision, appeals, ombudsman and other procedures, and the arguments you should use
- issues that come up when councils change their mind about who they want to recover from;
- how long the council must wait before the recover overpayments;
- getting money back from the tenant.
An on-line manual or a printed manual -
You can buy a printed manual which will be updated to be current at the date of dispatch to you. As an alternative, I'm also publishing the manual on line. The on line version will be optimised for navigation using a browser- not just a simple PDF file, and will be constantly updated with normally no more than a 2 week backlog so you will always have a current manual to work with. You will buy a subscription to the manual for a year.
An ordinary subscription allows one person to be logged in and reading the manual at a time, although this one person can be anyone in your organisation. You can also buy a further subscriptions at a reduced cost which allow more people to access the manual at the same time.
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For more information and online ordering see http://www.hbhelp.co.uk/General/OPGuideOrder.htm
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