Housing Benefit

To apply complete the Housing Benefit form.

What you need to apply

When you make a claim you may need to provide documents as proof of:

• your identity and national insurance number
• any savings and investments you have
• the earnings, benefits, pensions or any other income you receive
• your rent and tenancy.

It can take up to 30 days for us to deal with your new claim or change in circumstance. We will write to you to tell you about the decision once it has been made. Please do not contact us to check on the progress of your claim unless it has been 30 days since you completed the form.

Supplying further evidence

You can attach your proof to the application form or supply it at a later date by completing our Benefits Evidence Request Form and attaching your documents. This must be within 1 month of you submitting your application.

You can submit the following types of evidence:

• Image files – format GIF, JPG, TIF, PNG or BMP (maximum file size is 5000MB).
• PDF files – you can upload PDF copies of evidence (maximum file size 5000MB).
• The form does not support the upload of other file types such as DOC/DOCX (Microsoft Word) or xlx/xlsx (Microsoft Excel). If you want to submit evidence in this file type, you must save it first as a PDF document. This can be done by clicking ‘Save As’ in the file menu in Microsoft Word or Excel and selecting ‘PDF’ from the ‘Save As type’ dropdown menu. You can then attach the PDF document to the form.

If you are eligible to claim Housing Benefit and you also pay Council Tax for the home you live in, you only need to complete the Housing Benefit form. For information about what help you can get with your Council Tax, please visit our Council Tax Support Scheme page.

Housing Benefit can usually be backdated for up to one month if you can prove ‘good cause’. This could include:

• if you did not understand that you could claim for some good reason, such as a language difficulties
• if an official organisation wrongly told you that you were not entitled to Housing Benefit.

If you have reached the qualifying age for State Pension Credit you do not have to show good cause, and we can backdate your claim for up to three months, as long as you qualify for the whole of that time.

What should I do?

Make sure you fill in our online claim form for the period you are claiming for and give us all of the supporting evidence we ask for as soon as possible.

What happens next?

We will decide whether we consider your reasons are good enough to backdate your benefit. We will write to you and tell you our decision.

If we decide not to backdate your benefit, we will tell you why.

Can I appeal?

If you do not agree with our decision, you can ask us to look at it again or you can appeal against it. You must write to us within one month of getting our decision. Your letter should say why you are not satisfied.

You must tell us about any changes that could affect your Housing Benefit. Further information is on our Change of Circumstances page. You can also use our change of circumstances online form:

Some changes of circumstances will mean you have to move to Universal Credit for your housing costs to continue. Examples of this are if:

• there is a gap in your housing benefit
• you need to claim a new DWP benefit (for example coming out of work, becoming sick or claiming for a child for the first time).

For more details read about Universal Credit.

Changes to report

If you are claiming Housing Benefit you need to tell us as soon as possible if you, or anyone you live with, has any of the changes of circumstance listed below:

• a change of address
• someone moving in with you
• income changes (including wages, pensions, benefits, maintenance)
• changes to savings and investments
• Income Support or Jobseeker’s Allowance starting or stopping
• a change from Jobseeker’s Allowance (contribution-based) to Jobseeker’s Allowance (income-based)
• a dependent child leaving full-time education
• rent changes
• going abroad or being away from home for more than two weeks.

You must tell us within one month of a change happening. If you don’t you may lose some of your entitlement and we may pay you the wrong amount.

If we pay you too much, you will have to pay this back. For more information about overpayments please visit our Benefits Overpayment page.

Suspending payments

When a change has been reported that is likely to reduce the amount of entitlement, housing benefit payments will be suspended as soon as possible to avoid overpayment.

Notice of the suspension will be sent to you and your landlord, if they are receiving the payments directly from us.

Payments will begin again, if you are still entitled, as soon as the change has been assessed and the new entitlement has been calculated.

You can ask us to suspend your housing benefit payments if you have had a change that you expect will lower your entitlement amount. This could stop us from overpaying you. To do this call the Benefit team on 0300 3030164 option 3.

If you are unsure what difference a change might make to your payments you can get an estimate using our Benefit calculator.

Social housing

If you rent from a registered social landlord (for example ONGO Homes Ltd or Amplius Living) you can choose to have your payments made to you or your landlord.

Private renting

If you rent from a private landlord and we work out your claim under the local housing allowance (LHA) rules, we will usually pay your Housing Benefit direct to you, but there are some circumstances when we can pay directly to your landlord.

When payments are made

We pay Housing Benefit:

• to tenants every two weeks in arrears (for the two weeks already passed)
• to landlords, every four weeks in arrears (for the four weeks already passed).

How payments are made

Payments are always made by bank transfer (BACS), so we need to know the relevant bank or building society account name, sort code and account number. Each time a payment is made to a landlord we send them a schedule showing which tenant the payment is for, the amount and, the period it covers.

If you do not have a bank account, we may pay your housing benefit to your landlord for a short time until you have opened one.

For help and advice on opening a bank account visit the Money Advice Service.

Payment direct to landlords

Under local housing allowance (LHA) rules housing benefit will normally be paid to the tenant, but there may be circumstances where we can pay direct to the landlord.

Examples of when we can pay your landlord directly:

• you have a learning disability
• you have an addiction such as drugs, alcohol or gambling
• you have severe debt problems or have been declared bankrupt
• a landlord makes it a condition of your tenancy.

These are only examples and we consider each situation based on your situation. If you think you will have problems paying your rent, please visit our Direct payment to your landlord page to find out more.

You can also have payments made direct to your landlord to get a tenancy or to keep a tenancy where:

• your rent is set at, or reduced to, the LHA rate for your household or you can afford the rent (if it is higher than the LHA rate), then we may be able to make payments direct to your landlord
• a landlord makes it a condition of your tenancy, the rent is set at the LHA rate for your household or you can afford the rent, we may be able to make payments direct to your landlord.

For more information on direct payments to your landlord contact the Benefits Team.

Check your letters and bills

First you should check all of your Housing Benefit letters carefully to make sure they are correct. If you think they are wrong you must inform us straight away.

If you would like to have a calculation explained in more detail then contact the benefits team with your claim reference number and describe which decision needs looking at.

Review of the decision

After receiving your explanation, if you still think that the amount awarded is incorrect, you can ask us to reconsider the decision.

Your request needs to be in writing, marked clearly as a reconsideration request and state which decision you are disputing.

We will check our decision and write to you within two months of receiving your request.

• If we change the decision you will receive a new bill or housing benefit notification.
• If we do not change the decision we will send you a letter to explain the reasons why and tell you your appeal rights.

Appeal our decision

If you are still unhappy about our decision after receiving a reconsideration you can appeal.

Housing Benefit appeals must be made direct to our benefit team within one month of the date on the reconsideration decision letter.

You can only appeal to the Council about your Housing Benefit claim.

To make an appeal complete Appeal a Housing Benefit decision.

Make sure you explain clearly the reason you are appealing, because the tribunal service will not consider anything you do not mention in your appeal.

Late appeals

We may not be able to accept your appeal if we receive it more than one month after the date on the reconsideration decision letter.

Late appeals can only be accepted if there are special circumstances that caused a delay to the appeal, such as a death or serious illness.

In your appeal, you need to explain the reasons for it being late. A legally qualified tribunal judge will look at these reasons and decide if they can accept your late appeal.

The council (including Council Tax, Benefits, Business Rates and Debt Recovery teams) are now using SMS text messages to provide you with information about our services. Please note that these are only used in some cases and you should not rely on us sending you a text message to update you about your account.

How it works

If we already have your mobile number in our system you will be signed up for the service automatically. If we don’t have your mobile number or your number has changed recently and you would like to receive SMS texts please send an email to benefits@northlincs.gov.uk

Opting out

If you would like to opt-out of receiving SMS text messages for Benefits please email benefits@northlincs.gov.uk to confirm that you do not wish to receive information from us by SMS text message. You will need to give your claim reference, name and address so we can update your account accordingly.

Who sends the messages?

The SMS text messages are sent by North Lincolnshire Council and will show as “NL Council”. The sending of messages is a confidential service, your mobile number will not be shared with third parties and we will not send you any other marketing messages to your phone.

The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) is responsible for investigating housing benefit fraud.

If you think someone is committing housing benefit fraud, you can report it online to the DWP:

Report benefit fraud

The council is responsible for investigating all other suspicions of fraud, irregularity and misuse. You can report all other types of suspected fraud to the council.

Non Dependant Deductions for NLC-NELC 2025-2026 [PDF, 93Kb]

NEL&NL combined payment calendar 2024 – 2025 [XLS, 48Kb]

Housing Benefit and Council Tax Support Order 2006 statement (electronic comms. miscellaneous benefits)2014 [PDF, 572Kb]