Housing benefit...is it worth appealing or should I take the blame and pay up?

shady63

pandaspot wrote: »

Yes send a letter of complaint so at least it brought up with assessor involved. They will set the recovery amount of the overpayment at £9.90 a week from your benefit. What you could do is ask them to reduce the recovery amount. They should send you an income and expenditure form, ask them to reduce it to something more affordable

Sorry this happened to you

They've set the recovery amount at £14.90/week so I will ask the community law advisor to try and get it down a bit because on top of the £700 ish that we also have to pay back for CTB overpayment, things are going to be tight. It's very annoying, we thought we'd be debt free by May so we decided it was the right time to extend our family to coincide with this, baby is due next month and our outgoings are now a lot more than we'd anticipated, plus the stress of it all. Never mind. Thanks for taking the time to help everybody!

pandaspot

Your benefit will increase remember soon as you have the baby.

Don't think there will be any prob in reducing the o/p recovery amount

Good luck

Triggles

Anytime you are dealing with benefits, when things change, always ASK if they have all the paperwork they need. Since the person you spoke to said they would need to get the updated benefits figures, the best possible thing would have been for you to bring in the letter outlining the new benefits so they could have a copy.

FWIW, I just spoke to our housing benefits office two days ago, and as soon as they heard our benefits were changing, they told me "please make sure to bring us the letter showing your new benefits as soon as you get it, so we have that." They were very clear that they do NOT confirm the information through the DWP for benefits, but that we needed to bring in the letter. Any time we have had a change, they have asked for this letter, in very plain terms, and then it's OUR responsibility to make sure we take the letter in and ask if they need anything else.

Sorry you got burned on this, but they've got tons of claims they are working with.. you only have ONE... yours!! So it's important you stay on top of it and check back to make sure they have the paperwork needed.

shady63

Triggles wrote: »

Anytime you are dealing with benefits, when things change, always ASK if they have all the paperwork they need. Since the person you spoke to said they would need to get the updated benefits figures, the best possible thing would have been for you to bring in the letter outlining the new benefits so they could have a copy.

FWIW, I just spoke to our housing benefits office two days ago, and as soon as they heard our benefits were changing, they told me "please make sure to bring us the letter showing your new benefits as soon as you get it, so we have that." They were very clear that they do NOT confirm the information through the DWP for benefits, but that we needed to bring in the letter. Any time we have had a change, they have asked for this letter, in very plain terms, and then it's OUR responsibility to make sure we take the letter in and ask if they need anything else.

Sorry you got burned on this, but they've got tons of claims they are working with.. you only have ONE... yours!! So it's important you stay on top of it and check back to make sure they have the paperwork needed.

Yes, I wish they'd just told me to send the award notice in when I receive it, but they told me in writing and over the phone that they'd check my WTC and CTC entitlements and update my award accordingly, so that's what I thought they'd do. They didn't once ask for my TC award form. I so wish I'd had the intelligence to just send it anyway and not trust that they would do what they'd told me they would!