Duty to notify re spare bedroom?

Hi

We have received an overpayment notice of Housing Benefit Notice resulting in an overpayment of benefit at £1,049.84 for the period 01/04/13 to 15/03/15 and is clearly underoccupancy reduction as the amount is static week by week. The notice states that the overpayment occurred as the claimant did not notify a change in their circumstances at the time that they occurred. 

Do claimants have a duty to notify in these circumstances? 

TIA

Andrea

Depends what happened.

Obviously the claimant does not have a duty to notify the Council of a change in the regs, but it sounds as if the Council is saying that it was unaware of the claimant’s family circumstances from 1/4/13 and that is what caused the overpayment.  That might have arisen because the claimant had already had a change of circumstance before 1/4/13 that wasn’t reported.

Whether the claimant should have reported any such change (whatever it was) depends on whether they were specifically told in earlier decision notices that a change of that kind is one that needs to be reported, and whether it would have made any difference at that time.  For example, a claimant who is on ESA(ir) and DLA(c) would have changed nothing before April 2013 by reporting the departure of a non-dep from the household and would have had no reason to think it mattered.  But “change in household” might have been one of the examples of reportable changes listed in the claimant’s HB decision notices.

Even if the claimant entirely innocently and understandably failed to report a pre-April 2013 change that made no difference to their HB at the time, it doesn’t follow that any overpayment is non-recoverable.  The claimant needs to show that there was an official error and they couldn’t have been expected to realise they were being overpaid.

Official error could include a failure to ask pertinent questions: using the ESA(ir) plus DLA(c) example again, the Council could have identified cases like that and in the run-up to April 2013 sent out letters asking for up to date household info; failure to do so might be an offical error.  Even then the claimant has to show that they could not have known there was an overpayment - that would depend on what the HB decision notice looked like in April 2013, in particular whether it flagged up the existence of the bedroom tax and said why the claimant was unaffected by it according to the information the Council held.

Finally, has the o/p decision notice been sent to you as a person affected in your own right: is the Council saying the overpayment is recoverable from the landlord?  Do they say why they believe this to be so?

Many thanks

No reportable pre April 2013 change of circumstances occured.  HB just wasnt adjusted to reflect Bedroom Tax.  In truth I gather they realised this after a period of time but didn’t see it as their duty to flag this up..

Andrea