Overpayments and appeals
An overpayment is Housing Benefit paid for a period when you were entitled to less, or to nothing. GOV.UK lists the three usual causes: you did not report a change straight away, you gave wrong information, or you were overpaid by mistake. Being told you have an overpayment is stressful, but it is also a decision with a process around it, and that process has deadlines. This page explains the process in order.
How an overpayment is recovered
If you still receive Housing Benefit, the council normally recovers the overpayment by reducing your ongoing payments, within maximum deduction limits designed to prevent hardship, so your award does not drop to nothing. If you no longer receive Housing Benefit, the council will usually invoice you, and in some cases may refer the debt onward. If the amount causes hardship, contact the council and ask about the recovery rate: the rate is not always fixed, and a lower deduction over a longer period is often negotiable where hardship is shown. Do not ignore an invoice in the hope that it goes away, because it will not, and enforcement becomes harder to stop than a repayment plan is to agree.
When you may not have to repay at all
There is one important exception. If the overpayment was caused entirely by an official error, and you could not reasonably have known that you were being overpaid, you may not have to repay anything. This turns on both halves: the error must be the council's, not yours, and the overpayment must not have been obvious from your award letters. A payment that suddenly doubles without explanation is hard to miss. A small error buried in a complex calculation is a different matter. If you believe the official-error rule applies, say so explicitly when you challenge the decision, and explain why you could not reasonably have known.
Challenging a decision: revision, then tribunal
If you think a decision is wrong, you can ask the council to look at it again, which is called a revision, or appeal to the First-tier Tribunal, which is independent of the council. You can do both: ask for a revision and appeal at the same time, so that the tribunal deadline is protected while the council reconsiders. The deadline for both is normally one month from the date of the decision. The tribunal can only look at the evidence, the law and your circumstances at the time the decision was made, not at changes that happened afterwards, so your challenge must address the decision as it stood. Put the reasons in writing, attach the evidence, and keep copies of everything you send.
Late challenges and decision notices
A late revision or appeal can be accepted up to a maximum of 13 months after the decision, but only if you can show special circumstances that made it impractical to act within the month, such as a death, a serious illness, being abroad, or disruption to postal services. The council must also send a proper decision notice for a recoverable overpayment, showing the period, the amount and the reason, within the required timescale. If a notice is vague, ask for a full breakdown of the calculation before you accept the figure: you are entitled to understand exactly how it was reached, and councils do make arithmetic mistakes.