An overpayment is an amount of Housing Benefit that has been paid out, for which there was no entitlement.

Overpayments can occur for several reasons:

• The claimant may not tell the Council about a change in their circumstances (such as a change in income) in time to prevent too much benefit being paid.
• A fraudulent claim may have been made. This occurs when a person has deliberately provided a false statement or document or has deliberately failed to report a change of circumstances with the intention of obtaining or retaining benefit
• Either the Council or the Benefits Agency may have made a mistake when handling the claim. This is called an official error.

The Council can recover any overpayment of Housing Benefit that has been made unless it was caused by official error and it is reasonable to expect that the person who received the overpayment could have known that they were being overpaid at the time it was being paid to them.

The Council can always ask the claimant to repay any recoverable overpayment made in respect of their claim. However, we can choose to ask a third party who may have received the money direct from us to pay it back (this can happen where we paid the benefit direct to the claimant’s landlord).

If the claimant (or anyone affected by the overpayment) disagrees with the Council’s decision about the overpayment they have one month to write to Derby Benefits to either ask for a detailed statement, a review of the claim or make an appeal.