DO YOU UNDERSTAND THE RULES ON HOUSING BENEFIT OVERPAYMENTS ?
The rules on overpayments are in a state of constant change. Bad practice by councils in dealing with overpayments is common. Many housing organisations face huge bills for overpayments
To help you deal with all this I am issuing a new overpayments manual. The main part of the manual aims to be a simple guide to dealing with overpayments you are asked to repay. Appendices give you detailed information on overpayment law and practice, how to challenge decisions and important test cases. There are also some useful draft letters.
To keep the manual right up to date I am printing it in short runs in loose-leaf form. It is continually updated so that your copy will be right up to date.. This form of publication makes the manual more expensive, but with the large sums of money involved in overpayments I think this is worthwhile. The guide could save your organisation huge sums of money.
Issues covered include:
- why councils often get things wrong;
- common council errors and how to spot them;
- what information notifications of overpayments must give;
- how to get more information about the overpayment without wasting huge amounts of time;
- how to check if there really has been a recoverable overpayment of the amount requested;
- offsetting actual entitlement against the overpayment
- rules about how undeclared savings and capital must be treated; when recovery cannot be made from the landlord;
- how to influence the council to recover from the appropriate person even though there is normally no right of appeal on thisissue;
- how to deal with backlogs of overpayment requests;
- how to challenge decisions and bad practice using the revision, appeals, ombudsman and other procedures, and the arguments you should use;
- issues that come up when councils change their mind about who they want to recover from;
- how long the council must wait before the recover overpayments;
- getting money back from the tenant.
AN ON-LINE MANUAL OR A PRINTED MANUAL
You can buy a printed manual which will be updated to be current at the date
of dispatch to you.
The cost of this is £45 plus £5 postage and packing.
There are reductions if you order more than one copy at a time. You can
avoid the postage and packing charge by printing of the order from and sending a
cheque with your order.
You can
order the printed version online
and I will invoice you for you for the amount due,
or print off the order form
for the printed version
As an alternative, I also publishing the manual as an e-book, where you can
access the manual on line.
The on line version is optimised for navigation
using a browser- not just a simple PDF file, and will be constantly updated with
normally no more than a 2 week backlog so you will always have a current manual
to work with. You will buy a subscription to the manual for a year.
I think that this is a better deal. You can also print off the manual at any time.
You need to specify a log in name and a password. These are case sensitive
and should not contain gaps.
An ordinary subscription allows one person to be
logged in and reading the manual at a time, although this one person can be
anyone in your organisation.
You can also buy a further subscriptions at a
reduced cost which allow more people to access the manual at the same time.
Click to order the e-book.
Alternatively, you can save money by sending your payment with your order, through the post to me at PO box 2660, Lewes, BN7 2RW. Just send the money for the books. Post and Packing are free if you prepay. price guide
Please note, orders will only be accepted from non profit voluntary housing organisations, councils and other statutory organisations.