Rent Allowance

If you pay rent to a private landlord or a Housing Association, benefit is normally paid direct to your Bank account, every two weeks in arrears. If you would prefer we can pay the rent direct to your landlord, and this would be paid four weeks in arrears. If the benefit is paid direct to you, but your landlord shows us that you have fallen in arrears with your rent, we may choose to pay it direct to your landlord instead.

Rent Rebate

If you are a Council tenant (of which this Council now has very few), your benefit will be credited against your rent account.

Council Tax Benefit

The amount of Council Tax Benefit you are entitled to will be credited directly to your Council Tax bill in a lump sum. The lump sum will usually cover a future period, until the end of the financial year.

We will normally award you benefit from the Monday following the day on which we receive your claim. If, however, you receive Income Support or Job Seekers Allowance (income based), we will award you benefit from the Monday following the first day of entitlement to IS/JSA (income based), provided your benefit application is received by us within four weeks of your claim for IS/JSA (income based).

Backdating

We are only able to backdate your claim for benefit if you can show us that you had good reasons for failing to claim benefit earlier and those reasons continued up to the time that you made your claim. The maximum period we can backdate any claim is 52 weeks.