£66 million in housing benefit owed to council

NEARLY £66 million in overpaid housing benefit is still outstanding in Birmingham.

Housing benefit is paid directly to the landlords of people who are struggling to put a roof over their heads, and can also come in the form of rent reduction for council tenants.

It is one of the six legacy benefits slowly being phased out by Universal Credit.

Overpayments are unrelated to benefit fraud, and can happen for a number of reasons, including cases where the wrong information was included on a claim form, or where a claimant didn’t notify officials about a change in circumstances. They can also happen when a mistake was made by the housing benefit office, or when a claimant was given the incorrect amount for another benefit.

New figures from the Department for Work and Pensions reveal that as of the end of March, just under £66million of housing benefit that had been overpaid in Birmingham was yet to be recovered.

That was down from £69.3million at the end of March 2019.

The drop is partly due to the move to Universal Credit – fewer people on housing benefit will mean fewer new overpayments are being made. Overpayments worth £28.5million were identified in Birmingham in 2019/20 – just down from £28.7million the year before.

Meanwhile, £32.2million was recovered in the year to March, which was slightly up from £31.7million, but a further £5.2million was written off altogether as unrecoverable – up from £4.7 million.

Across the UK there was £2billion of overpaid housing benefit still outstanding at the end of March – down from £2.1billion the year before.

Some £598.8 million of new overpayments were identified over the course of 2019/20 (down from £740.2m), while £572.9million was recovered (down from £648.7 million).