Can you claim housing benefit retrospectively?

April 27th, 2010 by

My rent’s due beginning of February.

However, I’ve only earned £100 from work this month cos my hours have been cut from 5 days a week to 1. My rent’s £260 a month. I was hoping to bale myself out (as I’ve done before) by working hard for the last two weeks of the month. And I was offered a temp job for this week. But now that’s fallen through cos the company is winding down. So basically, unless I earn £400 in the last week of January, I will be out of pocket this month. If I’d claimed housing benefit at the start of the month I’d got my rent (or a large chunk of it) which is £260, plus £240 dole money (about £60 a week multiplied by four weeks), which is £500 in total. As it is, from work I’ve only got about £100.
So can I claim for housing benefit retrospectively (i.e. go in to their offices tomorrow and claim from 1st January (when my job changed from being five days a week to one day).
Thanks in advance for any answers.

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5 Responses to “Can you claim housing benefit retrospectively?”

1Back to the drawing board

In theory you sometimes can, I don’t know how often it’s successful, but it’s worth trying. You have to go to the council and ask to put in a request for backdating when you claim, you have to prove that you had a good reason for claiming late, for instance if you believed that your lowering of income was temporary.

Comment on Apr 30th, 2010 at 2:04 pm
2Lily B Talus

You can try

Comment on May 1st, 2010 at 12:56 pm
3babysparkle1975@btinternet.com

sometimes they will back date rent benefits but in your case seeings as you knew what was happening and was hoping to bale yourself out as you put it then i doubt they would. your claim would start from the date you got your application

Comment on May 4th, 2010 at 10:47 am
4Paula O

You can go to this website and they will tell you exactly what you are entiltled to, it is

Comment on May 5th, 2010 at 9:15 am
5Tertia

Just one teensy grey area here- How is it you were working 5 days a week (or planning to) and claiming dole money at the same time?

Comment on May 5th, 2010 at 7:21 pm

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