LakieLady
Well-Known Member
A bit of advice for anyone being migrated to UC from the "old" benefits.
Welfare rights organisations are finding that, when claimants are being "migrated" to UC, people whose housing benefit is paid directly to the landlord are finding that it isn't always being stopped promptly.
UC are supposed to send a "stop" notice to the council paying the HB, so that the HB is closed after the 2-week "run on" period (ie 2 weeks after the date the UC claim was made). This either isn't happening, or is not happening promptly enough to prevent HB overpayments.
When there's an overpayment, it's recoverable from the claimant, even if it was paid to the landlord. There's no mechanism for recovery from landlords (although one would hope that if the council is the landlord, they would just swap it from the rent account back into the housing benefit account, but who knows what they will actually do).
The organisation I work for is (thankfully) a bit late to the party with managed migrations and have only dealt with a handful of cases so far, but we're now advising clients to close their HB claims themselves 2 weeks after the date they started their UC claim, so that this shouldn't happen.
Welfare rights organisations are finding that, when claimants are being "migrated" to UC, people whose housing benefit is paid directly to the landlord are finding that it isn't always being stopped promptly.
UC are supposed to send a "stop" notice to the council paying the HB, so that the HB is closed after the 2-week "run on" period (ie 2 weeks after the date the UC claim was made). This either isn't happening, or is not happening promptly enough to prevent HB overpayments.
When there's an overpayment, it's recoverable from the claimant, even if it was paid to the landlord. There's no mechanism for recovery from landlords (although one would hope that if the council is the landlord, they would just swap it from the rent account back into the housing benefit account, but who knows what they will actually do).
The organisation I work for is (thankfully) a bit late to the party with managed migrations and have only dealt with a handful of cases so far, but we're now advising clients to close their HB claims themselves 2 weeks after the date they started their UC claim, so that this shouldn't happen.
