HB while working?

A question about : HB while working?

I am a regular on MSE forums but for the sake of personal info I've gone anon for this. Sorry.
My husband earns 15000 pa to support myself and two children. I was self employed, but no longer giving that up to be home with the children. I am a part time student and looking to return to work in the new year - again self employed.
I haven't made enough contributions for income support/jsa or what ever it is now.
We get Working and C Tax Credits of approx 110 pw.
We learned this week that hubby may lose his job soon, I was using the Turn2Us site for information about where we stand and where we might end up.
We rent our house from close family, with a legally sound tenancy contract. (hubby did a turn at CAB when out of work before )
If the site is to be believed we would be better off if hubby lost his job - we don't want to go that way.
Turn2Us suggests that we can claim something toward the housing benefit and council tax too. While he is working. When I rang the council about it some months back after checking on the Tax credits siteI was told that wasn't true, the advisor told me that the Goverment site was misleading.
We are really struggling to meet our day to day bills now as well as paying off some small debt. This would really help make the difference to being able to go out from time to time.
Are we able to claim HB or not.

Best answers:

• If your children are under 10 then you need to look at the 2 bedroom LHA rate for your area (irrespective of how big the property is) then you can put your figures through https://www.turn2us.org.uk/benefits_search.aspx to get an indication of what help you could get now
• Thank you Caz. I just called the council and apparently we are entitled to something because of the kids like you say.
  It's enough for us to do a good shop each week and not have to worry if we can afford the gas bill
  Thank you so much.