Direct payment to landlord

Local Housing Allowance (LHA) is Housing Benefit for people living in private rented property.

Local Housing Allowance is normally paid to the customer who should then use this to pay their rent.

The council can pay Housing Benefit direct to a landlord in certain circumstances:

Where a tenant owes rent of eight weeks or more.
Where a tenant has difficulty in managing their finances due to vulnerability.
Where a landlord has reduced the rent to a level affordable to a tenant.

You can only apply to the Council for direct payments if your tenant is in receipt of Housing Benefit. If your tenant is being paid Universal Credit, you should apply to the Department for Works and Pensions for direct payments.

Please note: if Housing Benefit is paid directly to you as a landlord, you must tell us straight away if you find out about any changes in your tenant's circumstances which may affect their benefit. Failure to do so could result in you having to pay back any overpaid benefit.

If you think you may be entitled to receive Housing Benefit directly to you, please complete our online form using the link below. This can also be completed by the tenant or on behalf of the tenant by a carer, advice or welfare agency, another service within the council or a friend or family member.

The tenant will be advised of any decision made to pay their LHA directly to their landlord.

We may require evidence with the application. We will tell you the type of evidence required. This can be uploaded and submitted with the application. This could be supporting information from the tenant's family or friends, GP, Social worker, Probation officer, carer or welfare agency,

Apply for direct payment to landlord

Help with uploading evidence

You may be asked to upload evidence on the application form. We can accept jpegs and pdf files but we advise pdfs as the file size is smaller.

Please don’t take photos of your PC screen or phone screen as these can be blurry. If you need to do this you should use the screenshot/print screen function on your PC or phone.

When you take a photo of a document such as a bank statement sometimes the file sizes are too big, especially if you have to upload a lot of different images to your form. This can cause the form to fail and we advise converting jpegs to pdfs. You can do this in the following ways.

On an Android phone

select image you want
from the menu select print image
select Save as pdf
choose where to save it
save

On an iPhone

select the image you want
tap the sharing button and select Print
at the Printer options screen, use a spreading gesture with your fingers on the image preview to show Save as pdf
select Share the converted photo as PDF and choose where to save it

On a PC

right click on the icon of the image
select Convert to Adobe pdf
click on the Save file icon in the top left hand corner
select where to save it
name it
save

If you receive an error message on submission of your application, this could be due to the size of the uploads within your application. Please check your emails to see if you have received an email confirmation of your application before contacting us or making another application.