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Carer’s Allowance - Earnings Query

J.Mckendrick
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Welfare Benefits Team - Phoenix & Norcas

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Total Posts: 279

Joined: 16 March 2012

Client wishes to claim C/A for looking after a person with PIP daily living - no problem there! Client has undertaken casual/part time labour for the last 3 months where the majority of client’s weekly take home pay is under £110-00 a week but on the odd week client did take home approx £120-00 a week. Can client make a claim for C/A for the passed 3 months in any event eg is clients take home pay equaled out over the last 3 months for an average weekly pay or must client only claim for the weeks he/she definately knows when less that £110-00 was taken home. Any views or experience of this would be appreciated.

alang
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Paisley South HA

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Joined: 9 February 2015

It depends on various things like if there is a cycle of work, (like works 10 hours a week for 3 weeks and than 25 hours on the 4th week), in most cases though an average over the last 5 weeks or so will be used, similar to HB, so it really depends how much of a close run thing the average is i.e £109 for 4 weeks and £120 for 1, might be a bit of a problem, but if it is just a one off it should be ok.

If making a backdate claim, I would have thought they would look for pay slips for the whole period of backdate and they should average for this period

Mike Hughes
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Senior welfare rights officer - Salford City Council Welfare Rights Service

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Joined: 17 June 2010

It’s going back a long way but most of this remains relevant.

http://www.rightsnet.org.uk/forum-archive/indexd701.html

I think it boils down to

- usually a 5 week average.
- otherwise if there’s a cycle.
- may be some ways of reducing the earnings anyway e.g. paying into a pension.
- the break rules allow significant leeway if there isn’t a cycle but there is the odd payment above.
- there is also an element of discretion. CAU are pretty rubbish at most/many of the things they do and this is one of them. However, a conversation with them can move things along positively very quickly.