Your tenant's claims for housing benefit (complaining as a landlord)

This fact sheet is aimed primarily at landlords whose tenants are experiencing problems with their housing benefit and may be considering making a complaint to the Ombudsman.

My tenant cannot pay his rent as he has problems with his housing benefit claim. Can the Ombudsman help me?

We would normally expect tenants who have problems with their housing benefit claims to make their own complaints to us. However, we accept that delays caused by the processing of tenants’ claims for housing benefit can affect you as a landlord: you suffer the loss of rent and, in some cases, these delays might cause you serious hardship.

Where you have received a decision from the council relating to your tenant’s housing benefit (such as deciding to recover an overpayment of housing benefit that was paid directly to you) you have a right of appeal to a First Tier Tribunal. In such cases we would normally expect you to appeal rather than make a complaint to us.

How do I complain?

You should normally complain to the council first. Councils often have more than one stage in their complaints procedure and you will usually have to complete all stages before we will look at your complaint.

Then, if you are unhappy with the outcome, or the council is taking too long to look into the matter – we think 12 weeks is reasonable – you can complain to us.

Usually, you should complain to us within 12 months of when you first knew about the problem. If you leave it any later, we may not be able to help.

For more information on how to complain, please read our step by step process.

If you can consider my complaint what will the Ombudsman look for?

We consider whether the council has done something wrong in the way it went about dealing with the housing benefit claim that has caused you problems. We cannot say whether your tenant is entitled to benefit, nor can we pass on information about your tenant that the council has given us during our investigation. Some of the issues we can look at are:

  • delay in the processing of your tenant’s claim
  • paying the benefit to the wrong person (for example, direct to your tenant even though the council knew that your tenant was in arrears with rent)
  • unreasonable delay in dealing with your correspondence
  • delay in dealing with your appeal (such as against a decision to recover housing benefit from you), or
  • failure to notify you of a decision that affects you (such as to pay housing benefit direct to your tenant).

What happens if the Ombudsman finds that the council was at fault?

We can recommend that the council takes action to put the matter right. This depends on what the complaint was about, but we may ask the council to:

  • determine the claim
  • pay the benefit due
  • issue or reissue the decision notice with the correct information and appeal rights
  • pay the legal costs of pursuing an ex-tenant where housing benefit was incorrectly paid to the tenant instead of you
  • make a payment to acknowledge the impact on you of the fault. The amount will depend on how you have been affected by what has gone wrong. Where we find unreasonable delay, we usually recommend that any outstanding benefit decision is made immediately. In some cases we may recommend a modest payment to recognise your inconvenience and financial problems. If you have had to take legal action against your tenant solely because of the delay to their benefit claim we may ask for a payment to reflect your legal costs, or
  • improve procedures to ensure that the same problems do not occur again. For example, we may recommend that the council holds meetings with landlord groups to discuss issues that affect them, in order to improve the general administration of benefits.

Examples of some complaints we have considered

Mr X’s tenant, Miss Z, was receiving housing benefit. The council has a policy that if a tenant claiming housing benefit for their rent falls into rent arrears for over eight weeks, the housing benefit can be paid directly to the landlord. Miss Z fell into rent arrears. Mr X’s representatives told the council several times Miss Z was in rent arrears. The council took nearly three months to respond. When it eventually responded, it agreed to suspend Miss Z’s housing benefit and make the payments to Mr X going forward. However, it declined to backdate the payments. We found the council was at fault for not acting in line with its policy. This meant Mr X incurred financial debt. The council accepted it was at fault. It agreed to apologise to Mr X, reimburse his overdraft and credit card charges, pay him £200 in recognition of his distress and reimburse the costs he would have received from the eighth week of Miss Z’s rent arrears.
Mr B’s tenant, Mr X, was receiving housing benefit. Mr B increased the rent Mr X had to pay. Mr X did not pay the increased rent. Mr B told the Council Mr X was in rent arrears. The Council started to pay the housing benefit directly to Mr B, but not at the increased rate. After eight months, the Council realised its mistake and it then paid Mr B the increased rate from when it first knew Mr X was in rent arrears. It paid Mr B £25 for its mistake. The Council accepted it was at fault not actioning the increase sooner. It agreed to pay Mr B a further £75 to put the matter right.
Mr D told the council his tenant, Ms T, was in six weeks of rent arrears. The council advised him it could not make the housing benefit payments directly to him until Ms T was in eight weeks of arrears. When Mr D contacted the council again several weeks later, Ms T had moved out and so no more housing benefit payments were due. We found no fault with the council as it correctly advised Mr D it could not pay the housing benefit directly to him until Ms T had eight weeks of rent arrears. This is what the regulations require.
Mr D’s tenant, Ms F, made a claim for housing benefit to pay her rent. Ms F told the council she had large rent arrears. The council overlooked the information about Ms F’s rent arrears and paid her £1,239 housing benefit. Ms F did not pass the benefit to Mr D. He could not recover the money from Ms F as she had abandoned the property and he did not know where she was. The council accepted it should have paid the £1,269 housing benefit to Mr D, not to Ms F. It agreed to pay Mr D £1,269 to put the matter right.

Our fact sheets give some general information about the most common type of complaints we receive but they cannot cover every situation. If you are not sure whether we can look into your complaint, please contact us.

We provide a free, independent and impartial service. We consider complaints about the administrative actions of councils and some other authorities. We cannot question what a council has done simply because someone does not agree with it. If we find something has gone wrong, such as poor service, service failure, delay or bad advice and that a person has suffered as a result we aim to get it put right by recommending a suitable remedy.

July 2023

LGO logogram

Review your privacy settings

Required cookies

These cookies enable the website to function properly. You can only disable these by changing your browser preferences, but this will affect how the website performs.

View required cookies

Analytical cookies

Google Analytics cookies help us improve the performance of the website by understanding how visitors use the site.
We recommend you set these 'ON'.

View analytical cookies

In using Google Analytics, we do not collect or store personal information that could identify you (for example your name or address). We do not allow Google to use or share our analytics data. Google has developed a tool to help you opt out of Google Analytics cookies.

Privacy settings

•