I’m a Welfare Rights Officer working for a Housing Association. I’ve been asked to look into our LA’s practice on recovering Housing Benefit overpayments form the Landlord.

Scenario:

A former tenant was claiming HB from April 2004 to Aug 2004; the tenant move out of the property in September 2005 to another part of the country. Recently the LA contacted the HA to inform them that they have just discovered that the former tenant was not entitled to HB from April 2004 to Aug 2004 and that they are seeking the benefit payment back from the HA.

HA are arguing that as they could not have reasonably known the tenant was not entitled to HB, they should be pursuing the tenant for payment and not them.

Has anyone any thoughts on how the HA can challenge this recovery?

try this link for starters


http://www.rightsnet.org.uk/dc/dcboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=102&topic_id=5529&mesg_id=5529&page=

Thanks Johnny.

If you're looking more generally at o/p recovery from yourselves, beyond this specific example (as your first line suggests), the obvious thing to mention is the April 2006 change. Any new overpayment basically has to be recovered from the person who caused the overpayment (usually by failing to declare something), if such a person can be identified. So as a rule of thumb, if you can demonstrate that you did not cause the o/p and the claimant did then that's all you need to do.

I recommend Circular A13/2006, Comms decision CH 4234/2004, and sections 4.10 to 4.20 of the DWP HB/CTB Overpayments Guide (recently updated) as good reading in this area.