HB overpayment

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Background

I received an ACAS out of court conciliation settlement in May 2014 from my previous employer with whom I was in a ‘zero hours’ contract. At this time I informed the Housing Benefit Department that I received this amount of money.

At this time the HB Department considered this payment as savings and not as income and stopped my housing benefit for one month because I was over the £16000 savings limit because of this payment
Then in July 2015 I filed my Self- Employment Earning Statement and I mistakenly included this amount in it. For this reason the Housing Benefit Department changed its minds and considered this payment as income and told me that I have an overpayment of HB of £5000

I asked the Housing Benefit Department to reconsider its decision telling it that I made a mistake in my Self- Employment Earning Statement and I asked it to comply with its initial decision and consider this amount only as savings but not as income. As a consequence it decreased my overpayment from £5000 to £3000 because it takes into account this amount only from the 11 May 2014 when I received it to the end of the financial years on the 05 April 2015. However it refused to consider this amount as savings and not as income and refused to cancel entirely this overpayment

The Housing Benefit Department replied me the following:


“We are allowed to include the Employment Tribunal Award as part of your income; however. I have only included it from the decision dated up to the end of your financial year which is 05/04/15”


I think that there are four issues involved in my case


1.
The first issue is whether this payment was income


1.1
I found in the Internet a big guide about overpayment. However this document does give any definition of what is ‘income’. Hence I would like to know if there is a law which give a definition of it or we have to rely only on the Oxford dictionary definition which says


“Money received, especially on a regular basis, for work or through investments”


1.2
I would like to know if any of the following points matter


1. Contrary to what says the HB department it is an ACAS out of court conciliation payment but not an award from the Employment Tribunal
2. I was not anymore an employee of this employer. It was a payment from my previous employer not my current employer
3. My previous employer accept voluntary to pay me this amount of money without admitting liability as stated in the ACAS agreement that we signed
4. My claim in the Employment Tribunal was for unfair dismissal and detrimental treatment but only for a very small amount as unlawful deduction of wages
5. Would have the HB department taken the same decision if it would have been an out of court settlement from a County Court?
6. This amount is not taxable so I did not need to declare it in my return but I mistakenly declared it
7. I have not worked to get this payment and according to the Oxford dictionary definition of income I have not worked the number of hours corresponding to this payment
8. I think that this payment is equivalent to a gift or an inheritance. Maybe a gift in exchange of me accepting to discontinue my claim in the ET. For example someone can offer a gift of money to someone else because he likes him or for another reason. Another example is when a landlord gives money to a tenant so that the tenant leaves his room
9. It is a one-off payment so we cannot count this as a regular income so the HB department should not have counted it in the average of my income (In the law of statistics when we calculate a median we remove any unusual value because it distort it)
10. If the HB department has the right to count it as income it should have counted it only for the month of May 2014 when I received it.
11. HB is paid every four weeks so maybe the HB department should have taken into account it only for the four weeks that I received it
12. I am self employed but this is not money from my self employment


2.
The second issue is that the HB Department did not tell me in its correspondence if it was an error from me or from them. Hence I do not know it has provided me with a proper ‘decision notice’.


3.
The third issue is that I found in this big guide that if the overpayment was caused by an official error, the overpayment is recoverable from the tenant only if he could have reasonably expected to be overpaid.

I think that it was not my fault because I informed the Housing Department when I received it and it sent me several correspondences asking me to explain the nature of this payment what I did. So it has all information in hand to take an informed decision. Hence I did not expect that there was an overpayment but how can I explain this to the HB department to convince it?


4.
The fourth issue is that the HB department has stopped to pay me my HB since the beginning of July 2015 because of this overpayment. However it sent me a letter where it says that it has decided to deduct from my housing entitlement a certain amount per week as ‘Overpayment Recovery’. Hence I would like to know if it should have complied with its decision to recover my overpayment by deducting every week a certain amount from my weekly entitlement to housing benefit. And as a consequence it should not have stopped to pay me housing benefit

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Concerning my point number 1 I would like to know if there is not a law which defines what income is. I do not think that a gift of money, money from lottery or an inheritance is income. Hence is the amount of money that I received from my previous employer income? I have done search in the Internet and I have find nothing about the fact that such amounts of money received should be converted automatically into monthly income


Concerning my point number 4 if the HB department decided to recover the alleged overpayment by stopping to pay me my HB for several months what was the point of taking a second decision to deduct a certain amount from my weekly payment. Are not these two decisions contrary?
In the big guide to which I make reference in my previous post nowhere I have seen that the HB department has the right to stop paying HB in case of overpayment when the tenant is still entitled to receive HB. I would like to know if there is a law which give such right to the HB department