Morning

Some help with this would be gladly appreciated. One of my tenants had their Hb paid direct to themselves. Arrears accrured (over 8 weeks arrears) on the account as the tenant failed to pay us the rent due. Their solictor wrote to the benefits unit (on 4th Dec) asking for the HB to be paid direct to us, and we wrote to them (on 18th Dec) as we hadn't heard anything. The benefits unit have only just dealt with our request and will be paying us the Hb from 29th Jan.

I have written to them as I have some notes that say what to do if hb continues to be paid to the claimant when hb direct has been requested. It advises that we should write to them as they have failed to follow hb regs and have failed to fufil their obligations. the notes say we should request that any hb direct due since our request is still paid to us. if says if the hb office fail to do this we should take this up with the ombudsman.

I have written to them but they don't seem to want to pay it and have asked what the regs are.

Anyone know what the Hb regs are? Or has anyone had anything similar and what have they done?

Thanks in advance,

Sophia

In the circumstances as described, the only possible recourse you have against the LA is to request compensation. The law does not allow HB to be paid twice for the same period.

However, as you could take action against the tenant for rent arrears, any compensation is likely to be restricted to reflect only time / trouble etc.

HB Reg 95(b)
"a payment of rent allowance shall be made to a landlord"....
"where sub-paragraph (a) does not apply and the person is in arrears of an amount equivalent to 8 weeks or more of the amount he is liable to pay his landlord as rent, except where it is in the overriding interest of the claimant not to make direct payments to the landlord."

Here it appears the LA have made the change and are paying you direct, the only issue is the period from when the request was made up to the actual change in payment arrangements.

It appears that HB has been paid to the claimant until the switch so there is no “outstanding” HB to be paid for that period.

All you are left with IMO is the possibility of approaching the Ombudsman saying the delay amounted to maladministration.

In response, however, the LA will be able to point to what are now quite a number of Commissioner’s decisions showing that delays in processing reported changes in circumstances of (in one case) up to 3 months don’t constitute an official error. The Ombudsman may find that persuasive in reaching a decision.

The LA will also point out that as the tenant is still resident with you that you are still able to take action to recover the outstanding rent from them and you therefore have suffered no loss.

All that said, there have been cases where the ombudsman has suggested awarding compensation in similar circumstances, but normally where a tenant has vacated and the landlord has little practical other recourse.

We had a similar case a couple of years ago. We were told that the claim was to be assessed and kept ringing to find out when we would get the payment. Only after several weeks were we told that the payment had gone direct to the tenant. We contacted the tenant who had spent the money after having rung the LA to make sure it was hers. We insisted that the LA paid us the money which they did, I don't know how they got round it.