Housing Benefit Overpayment
An overpayment of Housing Benefit can occur if your income or capital increases, your rent reduces, a child reaches the age of 18 (or if they leave school at an earlier age to take up an apprenticeship) or if someone moves into or out of your household. This is not a definitive list, so it avoid overpayments you should let us know immediately if your circumstances change. Even if you are not sure if it will affect your benefit, your should tell us anyway.
If an overpayment has arisen on your claim, you will receive a letter informing you of the amount and reason for the overpayment. You have a month, from the date of the notification letter, in which to ask for this decision to be reviewed. If there is another change during the period of the overpayment you have not told us about, please make sure you tell us when you ask us to look at the overpayment again as we may be able to reduce the underpayment further (this is called underlying entitlement).
Once you have been notified of the overpayment and a month has elapsed, we will start to recover it. If you are still in receipt of Housing Benefit, we will start recovering the overpayment from your weekly Housing Benefit entitlement. The current amount we recover is £12.75 per week (2023/24). This can be increased if you are working by half of any earnings disregards applied to your earnings. If you feel you cannot afford the amount we are recovering each week, please call us on 01684 272137 or email HBOP@tewkesbury.gov.uk to discuss the matter further. You can complete a financial form online at: financial questionnaire online form which will help us to work with you to find the amount you can afford to repay each week. If we agree to reduce the overpayment recovery rate, we will review this every 6 months.
If your Housing Benefit has been cancelled, you will receive an invoice for the outstanding amount and requesting that you pay the balance in full or make an arrangement to pay it back. If you want to discuss a payment plan, pleae call us on 01684 272137 or email HBOP@tewkesbury.gov.uk, If you have a financial form completed this will help when you ring, otherwise you will be asked to complete the form so we can work out a reasonable payment plan with you.
If you have received too much Council Tax Reduction, this is called a reversal. You will receive a revised bill once we have worked out how much the reversal is. If you are unable to make the monthly payment for your Council Tax, please contact the revenues team on 01684 272034 or email revenues@tewkesbury.gov.uk.
Pay your overpayment
When paying your overpayment please have your invoice number to hand.
Internet banking/standing order
Request an electronic transfer from your account to your bank account.
Lloyds Bank
Sort code: 30-80-12
Account number: 24598768
Please include your invoice number as the payment reference.
By telephone
You can use either your debit or credit card to make a payment over the phone. Please have your Invoice Number ready, ring 03300 883709. Please note you will be charged the same as dialling a local number (or this will be included in any free call package you have with your mobile phone provider).
Online
You can pay using your debit or credit card, the minimum payment is £1.00, go to Payments – Tewkesbury Borough Council and select Housing Benefit debt/overpayment, then follow the instructions.
FAQs
They usually happen if you don’t tell us about a change in circumstances which could affect your benefit, or because we have made a mistake when calculating your benefit.
Overpayments can happen if:
- you forgot to tell us that if your income has increased
- somebody moves into or out of your home
- you move out of your home and do not tell us
- you start work or change jobs
- the circumstances of other adults living with you change
- a dependent over 18 stops receiving child benefit
The list above only gives examples of situations that could cause overpayments and you must tell us about anything that happens that might affect your benefit entitlement.
Even if you have told the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) about your change in circumstance, you must still let us know yourself and not leave it to the DWP to tell us.
Every time we adjust your benefit you will receive a letter which states the information we have used to assess your claim. It is important you read this letter, as your are responsible for making sure that the information we have used is correct.
We will send you a letter giving you full details of the overpayment – how the overpayment happened, the amount you were overpaid, the period of the overpayment, how we will recover the overpayment and what to do if your disagree with it.
You will also receive an invoice which gives you your invoice number, and tells you how to pay the overpayment.
We can recover all overpayments, unless they are caused by an ‘official error’ and you could not reasonably have known you were being overpaid when you were being paid or told about your benefit. An official error is a mistake we or another government agency such as the DWP or Job Centre make.
Each case is different but when working out who the overpayment should be recoverable from we will look at:
- what caused the overpayment
- who received notification of the award
- who received payment
- who could have known the benefit was wrong
As a general guide:
- if either the claimant or the person who was paid caused the overpayment, we will recover the overpayment from that person
- if the overpayment was due to official error (our mistake0, we can recover from either the claimant or payee providing they could reasonably have known they were being overpaid
- if the overpayment is nobody’s fault we can recover the overpayment from either the claimant or the person who received the benefit
If we make a mistake and it is not reasonable for you or your landlord to have known that the benefit was wrong, we should not recover the overpayment.
Please contact us for advice – you can speak to a benefit officer or get an appointment with an overpayment officer.
You can also ask for a formal statement of reasons which explains in detail the reason for the assessment any any resulting overpayment. You must do this within one month of receiving our decision letter. Once you have received a statement of reasons you have a further 14 days to make an appeal.
Underlying entitlement can help to reduce an overpayment of housing benefit or council tax reduction.
Any overpayment should be reduced by any benefit which you would have been entitled to had all your circumstances been known at the time of the overpayment.
For example if your job seekers allowance stopped because you started work and you failed to provide proof of your new income, you could be overpaid. If at a later date, you provide pay slips which show that based on your income, you could have qualified for some housing benefit, we could use underlying entitlement to reduce the overpayment by the amount of benefit you were entitled to. This will reduce the amount of the debt owed.
You have a month from the date we first told you about the overpayment to ask us to look at the decision again (known as a revision) or to make an appeal to the appeal tribunal.
If we look at the decision again and you are still unhappy with our decision, you have a further month from when we notified you of your review decision, to ask for an appeal.
If we have overpaid your council tax reduction, we will add the amount of the overpayment to your council tax bill. Our council tax office will then collect the overpayment by increasing your monthly payments.
If we have overpaid your housing benefit, there are several ways that the overpayment can be recovered, including:
- reducing your Housing Benefit payment each week
- sending you a bill to pay
- asking the Department for Work and Pensions to reduce your social security benefits and pay an amount towards the debt
- asking your new council to make the deductions from your Housing Benefit if you have moved our of the Tewkesbury Borough Area
If you remain in receipt of Housing Benefit, then we normally recover the outsanding overpayment by deducting an amount every week from your Housing Benefit to reduce the outstanding overpayment. You will have to make up any shortfall that this causes to your rent due.
In all cases we will invoice the landlord for the overpayment.
If a landlord does not pay the invoice, we can apply for a county court judgement. This is where a court orders them to repay a debt. We can take action up to six years from the date that:
- the overpayment was made; or
- the debt was last acknowledged by the landlord; whichever is later
If we decide to recover an overpayment from the landlord, we may take it from payments we make to that landlord for another tenant’s Housing Benefit. This is often known as ‘blameless tenant recovery’. It usually happens when the tenant who is overpaid is no longer entitled to benefit. We cannot recover the money from the overpaid tenant’s ongoing benefit but we can recover it from the landlord.
The landlord cannot penalise the other tenant (the blameless one). So they must still credit the other tenants rent account as though blameless tenant recovery had not happened.
You can make an offer to pay monthly instalments, please contact our benefits team who can provide you with further information.
If you are having financial difficulties please visit out website Financial advice & support – Tewkesbury Borough Council you will find some useful information and contact details of local support that may be of assistance to you.
