Our local councils pay HB fortnightly or 4 weekly even though most private tenants have a monthly rent liability. This means they have to subsidise their HB payments from their other income (eg on a rent of £650pcm, 4 week's HB would be only £600 so the shortfall is £50).

HB Reg 91(1) requires authorities to have regard to the frequency of rent liability and the "reasonable needs and convenience" of the claimant but locally this regulation has been ignored. One local authority rejected an initial request on the grounds that the change to their software would be too expensive!

After notice of an application for judicial review, the Council has now allowed monthly payment of HB.

I would be interested to know whether other local authorities are more enlightened than ours or whether fortnightly or 4 weekly payment of HB is pretty much universal.

My authority pays all new Private tenants 4 weekly in arrears,reagardless of the frequency of their rent. Those stil under the old shcemes (DRT etc) may be paid 2 weekly in advance. They get paid the same amount over 52 weeks but have 13 payments instead of 12 monthly. I agree this does make it hard to budget.

This problem can cause a lot of aggrevation for private tenants whose landlords don't understand the system, and are even less interested - as far as they are concerned their rent account is in arrears.
The situation is often not helped by RO's decisions which do not match the asking rent - which happens increasingly in this part od the world - leaving the tenants to make up that shortfall already, without the hassle of 4 week/monthly payments.
I worry about what the attitude will be towards would be tenants who are benefit claimants when LHA comes in.

My LA uses the Academy system - which is capable of paying monthly. I only found this out a few weeks ago when somebody mentioned it because (of course?) we don't use it. Groan.

Our Local Authority converted to Academy last June and pays out 4-wkly

We previously paid out monthly (using the old letting dates 4/12/20/28) however since 28.03.2005 we converted to Monday-Sunday which resulted in paying out 4-wkly. This caused a problem for our largest landlord (formerly LA Housing Dept - stock transferred to not-for-profit landlord) therefore from April 2006 they amended their system to charge on a weekly basis, therefore when HB was paid every 4 weeks it worked out. However, no LA can expect all landlords to revert to this. Landlords were briefed prior to the change from monthly to 4-wkly payments and advised how to work out "Technical arrears/credits" on accounts to prevent them from pursuing for incorrect balances and paying out any untrue credits which would result in their Rent Account not matching up at end of year.

To my knowledge we have not had any major problems with this being an issue for a landlord, but then again the LA are hardly going to admit if it has resulted in any.

Also, in response to Mike who stated that RO's decisions sometimes result in a shortfall of the rental charge - advise you customers to apply for a Discretionary Housing Payment - this may help them out for a period of time but it is not always guaranteed to be awarded, but still it is worth a try.