Advisers

RR2 - A guide to Housing Benefit and Council Tax Benefit

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Terminology

There are a number of terms in this guide which have specific meanings. The following list, which is given for guidance only, is a summary of those terms:

Income is all the money that you have coming in from earnings, social security benefits, maintenance payments and other sources.
Capital means your savings, investments and the value of property and land owned but not occupied by you. You will not get Housing Benefit (HB) or Council Tax Benefit (CTB) if your capital is worth more than £16,000, unless you are aged 60 or over and receiving Pension Credit (Guarantee), in which case there is no set limit on the capital you can have.
Partner

We use partner to mean:

  • a person you are married to or a person you live with as if you are married to them, or
  • a civil partner or a person you live with as if you are civil partners.
Children for HB/CTB a child is described as someone who has not reached his or her sixteenth birthday. After that children are classed as young persons up to their nineteenth birthday as long as they remain at school or in non-advanced education at college. In this guide a young person is treated the same as a child, so the word child may refer to a child or young person.
Applicable amount represents the needs of you and your family, if you have one. The applicable amount is made up of three parts: a personal allowance; personal allowances for children in your family; premiums.
Right to reside and habitually resident

We will decide if you have a right to reside and are habitually resident by asking you things like:

  • Whether you have worked in the UK
  • How long you have lived abroad
  • Why you have come to the UK
  • How you plan to support yourself in the UK
  • How long you plan to stay in the UK.

We may be able to treat you as having the right to reside and habitually resident if you:

  • Are a European Economic Area (EEA) national who is a worker or has the right to reside under European Community (EC) law
  • Are a member of the family of an EEA national who has recently been a worker
  • Have refugee status
  • Have been given exceptional leave to enter or remain in the UK
  • Left Monserrat after 1 November 1995 because of the volcanic eruption
  • Have been deported to the UK
  • Left the Lebanon on or after the 12th of July 2006 because of the armed conflict there
  • Have Humanitarian Protection granted by the Home Office.

For more information, contact your local council.

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