Housing Benefit Home Visit

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The phrasing on the various websites I've been browsing seems ambiguous, but I'm reasonably sure it's for 13 weeks at a time. Anybody has this allowance, and it's 52 weeks for other categories - people who need to care for a sick relative, students on approved training courses, people who have to leave home due to some sort of threat etc.

I would imagine it's a fairly small number of people who need to travel abroad for these sorts of reasons.

elmer

Hi, the rules have recently changed for the way HB is overseen, and our visiting officer now has to visit 75 claims per month for verification picked randomly by claim number by a computer. We are a very small council with 4 full time VOs so larger councils will have more visits, they dont get incentives like TVs (hed like to know which councils give these out) and most of the time his visit is just to check that everything is OK, we get about 5 fraud cases every month of which only 1 case on average is persued further, the rest are usually sorted out. I realise that a visit is likely to feel alarming from a claimants point of view,but its really routine so please try not to get too worried about it.

Elmer