Please see Housing benefit.

Under the Data Protection Act there is limited information that we can provide. If we do not pay Housing benefit to you in respect of your tenant, we will not be able to provide you with any information at all.

If you are in receipt of Housing benefit in respect of your tenant we will be able to confirm:

• The date that benefit started and ended.
• The weekly amount of benefit and how often it is paid.
• The amount we are taking from benefit to recover an overpayment.
• The details of any cheque or bank automated payments sent to you.

If we send payments of Housing benefit to an agent, we will only be able to provide the above information to the agent. Written notifications will always be sent to you if your tenant starts/stops receiving benefit, if there is a change in the amount of benefit paid or if your tenant has been paid too much benefit.

If you receive payments of Housing benefit directly to you, it is your duty - along with your tenant’s duty -to report changes in circumstances that may affect their entitlement.

When changes in circumstances lead to an overpayment of Housing benefit we try to recover this amount in most cases. If your tenant remains in receipt of benefit, this would usually be by an ongoing deduction from Housing benefit payments until the debt was clear.

If your tenant’s entitlement to Housing benefit ends, we will decide who to recover the overpaid benefit from. This means that you could receive an invoice for the amount of overpaid benefit. When we decide to recover an amount overpaid from you, we will send you a notification letter explaining the amount of overpaid benefit, the period that the overpaid benefit relates to and the reasons for our decision.

You will have 28 days from the date of the invoice to repay the amount. If you do not think you can pay within 28 days you should contact the debt recovery section immediately to make an arrangement, see contact us.

If we do not receive a payment from you and have not accepted an arrangement to pay, then you would receive a court notice. For information about Housing Benefit overpayments, repayments and court proceedings, please contact the debt recovery section.

The decisions that you are allowed to contest as a landlord are restricted to:

• The amount of any payment/overpayment of benefit.
• The period that a benefit has been/will be paid for.
• The fact that we have decided to recover an overpayment directly from you.

For more information about how to appeal, see appeals.

If your tenant is at least eight weeks in arrears with their rent, you have the right to ask for benefit payments to be sent directly to you. You will need to put this request in writing stating clearly your tenants name and address, the arrears details and that you would like further payments to be sent to you.

We will write to your tenant to give him/her notice of this, they have the right to disagree with this. If there are no grounds with which the tenant can disagree or we receive no response we will pay the benefit directly to you.

We will suspend benefit payments from the date that we receive your letter until we decide where to send future cheques.

You will need to complete a direct payments form if you would like payments to go into an account.