Terms & Conditions

[Inga Mycroft]

If you have a request from a claimant to pay their HB to a third party, ie not their landlord but maybe the tenancy guarantor or some one who manages their finances for them, do you ask the third party to sign anything to say they accept responsibility for the payments? Or do you just issue the payments to the third party without any further enquiries?

If you do issue a form to the third party I would be gratefu if you could send me a copy – inga.mycroft@harrogate.gov.uk

thank you

Inga

[jmembery]

We don’t have a form but we have had a couple of nasty experiences with 3rd party payments.

In our cases, it was in effect a device to get around payments not being made to the landlord I.E the 3rd party was a close associate of the landlord (although we normally didn’t know that at the time). Various disputes arose of how much had been received by the 3rd party and when.

There have also been issues around overpayments, (leaving aside the issue of whether a payment to a nominated 3rd party is counted as payment to a person entitled and what can be recovered from whom).

We have also had issues where the claimant moves and “assumes” that we would know that they didn’t want us to make payments to the 3rd party in respect of the new address as it was a different landlord, resulting in arrears at the new address before the claimant realises we are still paying the 3rd party. in that case the 3rd party refused to give the claimant the HB we had paid in respect of the new address as they had passed it on to the old landlord.

[Inga Mycroft]

Thank you for your reply.
At the moment it’s a bit ad-hoc here how we deal with third party payments so it’s interesting to hear other LAs experiences before we set a procedure up.

[mickbullock]

Apologies for opening up this old thread but we don't get many of these and just wanted to see what others do. This refers to a third party who is not a landlord or agent for the landlord.

Reg 94 (3) allows this but says we "may" so it's discretionary so no formal right of appeal but must have reason to refuse. Overpayments could be recovered from third party and they would be person affected (same rules as landlord)  

The case I have is where the claimant wants HB paid to daughter (who does help her deal with other things such as Council Tax etc but is not an appointee). the landlord (who is her other daughter) uses an agent to collect rent (we have established commerciality etc).  

We can pay third party but bearing in mind above posts (re possible problems with overpayments and payee being close associate of the landlord) I am considering the decision carefully.

I would be interested to hear what others think and what they do to make third parties aware of duties + possible OP's etc (we would ask for written detailed request from claimant for authority and reasons and ask 3rd party to confirm acceptance of payment/duties and responsibilties).

thanks Mick

 

 

[Author]

Posts