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PIP AWARD AND CLAIMING INCOME SUPPORT AND SDP
Please can someone advise. One of my clients was in receipt of Incapacity Benefit until 24/02/14 when he was transferred to ESA Support Group following ATOS medical assessment. In September 2013 I also helped him make a new claim for PIP and on 15/09/14 was awarded Enhanced Dailing Living and Mobility backdated to 20/09/13. He has received backdated SDP on ESA to 25/02/14. If it had not taken a year to make a decision on PIP he would have been entitled to claim Income Support in addition to Incapacity Benefit as he lives alone and would had got SDP. I helped him make a wholly backdated claim for Income Support claim form completed and returned in November 2014. DWP are denying receipt of the claim and when I phoned said he would need to end his ESA claim if he wanted to claim IS. I explained that the IS was wholly backedated prior to ESA start date. As we had not claimed Income Support at time of submitting PIP application should they still consider backdating as I sent original form within 3 months of PIP decision.
I think you’re out of luck here. See p.1149 of WBH 2014/15 that explains rules about backdating of IS following the award of a qualifying benefit.
The key issue is whether an income support claim was made previously and refused whilst the person was awaiting a decision on a qualifying benefit, amongst other rules. As it doesn’t appear that this was the case (as you state that you only made the initial IS claim in November 2014), I’m not sure your client would satisfy the rules in reg.6(16)-(26) which governs backdating in such cases.
Additonally, personal independence payment is not a qualifying benefit under current legislation anyway, unlike disability living allowance for example. However, we’ve been advised that this is an oversight that should be rectified sometime in 2015 and that DWP should treat PIP awards as being a qualifying benefit in the meantime.
I recently had a similar case to this. The DWP actually did a calculation and paid the client the amount due under IS/SDP/Carers minus the benefits they had been paid. The correspondence showed the calculation for this. Sorry but I can only give very general info on this as I have just moved posts to another agency and cannot therefore access the details of the case. Hope this helps
thank you for replies. I am going to send an IS claim again and see what happens