Benefit Overpayments

Contact

Benefits

Tel: 01509 634844

These occur when a person is paid more benefit than they should have been paid or paid when they were not entitled. Here are some examples of how overpayments occur:

  • Your income support or Job Seekers Allowance stops
  • Your income or capital increases
  • Someone moves into your property
  • You move out of a property
  • The Benefits Service makes a mistake causing too much benefit to be paid

How Can I Stop Overpayments Occurring?

  • You should tell the Benefits Service straightaway when your circumstances change. If you do not tell us and we decide that you did so fraudulently you might be prosecuted or face some other sanction.
  • We will send you a decision letter telling you how your benefit is calculated. If you think that any of the information on it is wrong you should contact us straight away so we can check your benefit.

What happens when benefit is overpaid?

If you are overpaid we will send you a decision letter showing the following:

  • The dates the overpayment covers
  • The weekly amount of benefit you were paid
  • The weekly amount of benefit you should have received
  • The weekly amount overpaid
  • The number of weeks you were overpaid for
  • The total amount you were overpaid
  • The reason for overpayment
  • Whether the overpayment is recoverable from you

If the Benefits Service has made a mistake we can still ask you to repay the overpayment if we think you should have know about the mistake but did not tell us.

If we paid your landlord we can ask them to repay the overpayment but we always have the right to recover from you. If we have paid the benefit to your landlord but you have committed benefit fraud we will always recover the overpayment from you.

Repayments of Overpaid Benefit

Council Tax

We will send you a new bill with the overpaid amount added back to what you owe.

Housing Benefit

If you continue to receive Housing Benefit we will recover the overpayment from your new award. It will be recovered at a rate of £9.15 per week, unless you were overpaid fraudulently, in which case the recovery rate will be £12.00 per week. If you receive less than £9.00 or £12.00 per week we will reduce the recovery rate. The rate will also increase if you have any disregarded income, We can add half the amount of the disregard to the above figures.

Whilst deductions are made from your benefit you must pay the recovered amount, as well as any rent you already pay, to your landlord to ensure you do not go into arrears. If you cannot afford the deduction we make then you should contact the Overpayments Section to negotiate a new rate. We will ask you to provide proof of your income and expenditure before doing this.

If you no longer receive Housing Benefit we will send you an invoice with instructions on how to repay. When you receive the invoice please contact the Overpayments section to arrange repayment.

If you ignore the invoice we will send you reminders, if you ignore these we can refer the debt for County Court Action. This will result in you owing both the debt and legal costs.

IT IS IN YOUR INTEREST TO CONTACT THE OVERPAYMENTS SECTION IMMEDIATELY TO AVOID THESE EXTRA COSTS.

If we recover overpaid benefit from your landlord they will ask you to make extra payments to them to avoid or clear rent arrears.

Getting the Overpayment Reduced

In certain circumstances we may be able to reduce the amount of an overpayment you have to pay back. We may be able to work out what benefit you would have been entitled to if we had known your correct circumstances at the time of the overpayment. This is called UNDERLYING ENTITLEMENT.

Any "underlying entitlement" will be used to reduce the amount of the overpayment. If we are able to do this we will write to you for the information we need. You must provide this within 1 month of our request. If you don't you will owe the full overpayment.

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