Medically retired and eligibility for Housing Benefit

I will be seeing a client next week, she said that she will be medically retired from London Transport following a botched operation which has now affected her mobility.  She is already getting some PIP and I will be advising her about claiming contributory ESA. Her employer is likely to pay her a very large lump sum ( around 30K) in the near future, so I am presuming that this will be taken into account for purposes of HB? . I can see in CPAG that occupational pensions, personal pensions etc are taken into account, but cannot find anything about being medically retired and lump sums. I know it should not affect her cESA, but can anyone confirm this or point me in the right direction?

Is the sum related to the botched operation?  Could it go into a personal injury trust?

Payments of personal injury compensation are dealt with at p.353 of WBH 2015/16, with the basic position being that such a payment can be disregarded for 52 weeks, but the rules quickly become more complicated if a trust is then set up with such a payment.

Thanks for your help, I will ask the client if she will be receiving the payment as a personal injury compensation and advise her of Trust Fund, as I can now see that this could be treated as capital

I am not sure this is compensation for personal injury: it’s not as if TfL carried out the botched operation is it?  Seems to me more like severance pay - compensation for loss of employment.

If so the issue then is whether it falls to be treated as earnings for a period or as capital immediately.  HB Reg 35(1) defines “earnings” as, inter alia:

(b) any payment in lieu of remuneration except any periodic sum paid to a claimant on account of the termination of his employment by reason of redundancy;
(c) any payment in lieu of notice or any lump sum payment intended as compensation for the loss of employment but only in so far as it represents loss of income

I would say that any portion of the payment caught by those subparas will be earned income over the period it represents and the balance (if any) will count as capital immediately.