Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what safeguards his Department has introduced to ensure that when housing benefit is paid to tenants it is paid to the landlord.

Payments of Housing Benefit can be made to either the landlord or the claimant. We recognise that in a minority of cases some claimants may not utilise their Housing Benefit for the purposes of paying their rent. To minimise this we have put safeguards in place to pay Housing Benefit directly to the landlord if the claimant is likely to have difficulty in managing their rent payments, or is unlikely to pay their rent or is in rent arrears equivalent to eight weeks.