The City Council processes Benefit claims for City Council tenants, Housing Association tenants and private tenants. Whoever you pay your housing costs to, the process for claiming Benefit is essentially the same. If you want to claim Housing and/or Council Tax Benefit, you must complete a Benefit Claim Form.  It is your responsibility to fill in the form correctly and provide the original proofs asked for on the claim form to make sure we can process your claim.

Home owners can also claim help towards paying their Council Tax bill – it is based on the same information as for Housing Benefit, except it uses the Council Tax as its base rather than the Rent.

When you make a claim, please make sure you supply us with all the original proofs requested on the form when making your claim.  You must provide original documents, not copies.

If you do not have all the information we need, send as much as you can with your claim form and the rest as soon as possible. We will write to you if further information is required from you.

Failure to provide all information required can delay the processing of your claim. You might lose out on benefit that you could be entitled to if you delay replying to us.

Some tenants become subject to recovery action because of problems in payment of benefit. This can be due, in part, to applicants not providing information requested on time. Don’t let this happen to you.

If you are claiming benefit, whether you are a tenant or a home owner, you must always also tell us if you have any changes in your circumstances. Examples of such changes are:

• A change in your state or works pension
• When you start a job
• If you stop getting Income Support or Job Seekers Allowance
• If in work, your hours or earnings increase or decrease
• Where you start to get any new benefits paid by Jobcentre Plus/Pensions Agency (formerly Benefits Agency)
• If there is an increase or decrease in the number of people who live in your property, like a baby is born or a grown son or daughter leaves home.
• If your Rent amount changes
• If you move home.  You can download a change of address form here

This is not a full list of all changes. Please advise us of any changes in your circumstances in writing as soon as they happen to avoid any problems later on.

For more information or to request an application form, please contact our Customer Contact Centre.  You can also download a Benefit claim form here .

NOTE:  This claim form has been deisgned to be easy for you to fill in.  It may seem long but we have to ask a lot of questions to make sure that everyone who claims gets the right amount of benefit.  You will not need to fill in every section of the form - it depends on your situation.