Reporting Urgent Rent Arrears: Information for Landlords
If you are worried that a tenant may be receiving Housing Benefit payments but not using them to pay rent, or that they are about to leave your property and deliberately default on arrears, you should let us know immediately.
If we are able to establish that a person is abusing benefits payments, or there is a risk of this happening in the future, we can consider paying direct to the landlord. If you are concerned that this may be happening, please phone or email us immediately so that we can investigate the situation. We may then need to speak to the tenant and yourself and consider any information or evidence provided. We would normally suspend payment to prevent any monies going astray while we investigate.
Our phone number is 0300 5558100, or our email address is landlords.benefits@dudley.gov.uk
It is essential that any email report of arrears is clearly identifiable and includes the right information.
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Please head the email “URGENT RENT ARREARS” in the subject box of your email.
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Then please make sure you include the following information,
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Your full name, address and phone number
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The full name and address of the tenant
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Their Housing Benefit reference number if known
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The amount of arrears owed
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The date and amount (if any) of the last payment you received
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Then please give full details of all contact you have had with your tenant to discuss the problem and what action you have taken to recover the arrears
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If your email does not include the required information and is not clearly identified, we may not be able to give it any priority and the matter will not be dealt with as urgent.
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You may wish to also need to send us by post any further evidence that you would like us to consider when we make our decision, such as copies of letters to the tenant, rent books etc.
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Please note that although we will investigate any report of arrears, Data Protection rules limit the information we can share with you, if your tenant has not given us signed authority to discuss their benefit claim.
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All Housing Benefit payments are now made by BACS direct to a bank or Building Society account. Before we can make any payment of benefit direct to a landlord, we will need their full bank details. If we require these from you, we will send you a short form for you to confirm your account details.
If we do make a decision to pay further benefits direct to the landlord, the decision will be reviewed after a suitable length of time. You should use this period to work with your tenant to make arrangements to clear any arrears that have occurred and to look at how they will manage their finances in the future.
