Hello all

One of my client's who is 71 years old and in poor health, has just had a demand for a HB overpayment, which non of us knew anything about. I called Housing Benefit who told me that the overpayment had been action in 1999, and payments towards the overpayment had been made until 2005, then nothing. It looks as if HB had forgotten about it, as he has been on housing benefit since 2005 but no clawback has been taken. It seems the only reason why this came to light is because the council housing stock is being transfered to a social housing provider and in turn the housing benefit payments, otherwise I suspect it would still be lost in the system. the client said he has never received any letters since 2005 to say that he stilll had an overpayment.

As the client has been on Guaranteed Pension Credit for a long time, I wanted to find out the dates of the overpayment to see if he was on PC at the time to consider an any time review on grounds of linking benefit. I found two problems with this, firstly the HB dept could not provide dates of overpayment as to long ago, the lady from HB said she would have to speak to the manager. The other problem was I could not find anything about any time reviews in my current information system, but is in previous years. My questions are then;

(1) Does anyone have the appropiate legislation regardng rights to overpayment dates.

(2) Do any time reviews still exist.

Both are covered by the D&A Regs 2001.

The right to a written statement is covered by reg 10. There is no time limit to this.

The anytime review is covered in Reg 4.

You ought to get hold of copies of the original letters. You could find that they were defective and so you could argue that as a result the time limit for appeals has not expired because the clock has not started to run.

Its worked for me a few times

Many thanks for everbody's help.