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Forum Home  →  Discussion  →  Work capability issues and ESA  →  Thread

Does Council Tax Support allow Permitted Work earnings before reductions?

Judy Scott
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Has anybody come across any instances of a person declaring higher level earnings (up to £101 a week) as allowed by Permitted Work to their local authority?

If so did they keep their earnings as allowed by Housing Benefit (and used to be with CTB ) or did they have their Council Tax Support reduced?

I realise that each authority make their own rules on charging but as I understand matters - The Council Tax Reduction Schemes (Default Scheme)
(England) Regulations 2012 No 2886
sets out required standards?  Or does this only apply if the local authority does not introduce their own rules? 

If the Default Scheme Regs do set standards for local authorities there are references to ‘exempt work’ in the schedules. £20 earnings are ignored but it is unclear to me if the higher amount must also ignored for the purpose of calculating Council Tax Support.

Any thoughts would be most welcome.  I am thoroughly baffled.

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HB Anorak
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Yes, para 6 of Schedule 5 to the default scheme disregards any exempt earnings: the reference to £20 concerns couples where the one doing exempt work is earning less than they could do - some of the partner’s earnings can be disregarded up to a combined total of £20.  In other words, all earnings from exempt work are disregarded in all cases but if one member of a couple only has a tiny amount of exempt earnings they can carry over some of their partner’s regular earnings and the result may be a higher disregard from the combined earnings than would otherwise have been the case.

You can express it as a formula where D = disregard, £EW = earnings from exempt work and £P = partner’s earnings:

D = max(£EW, min(£EW + P, £20))

If the person doing exempt work earns more than £20 a week, none of that matters at all.

But that’s only the default scheme: in England, the local authority does not have to use the default scheme and so if they have decided not to disregard earnings from exempt work any more generously than they disregard regular earnings it is entirely up to them.

In practice, the majority of local schemes took the default as a template and adapted it to include local features (mainly limits on maximum entitlement).  The exempt work disregards form a fairly obscure part of the default scheme and I would think that the majority of authorities have (whether consciously or not) included those rules in their local scheme simply because it did not occur to them to make any changes.

[ Edited: 6 Sep 2014 at 01:38 pm by HB Anorak ]
Judy Scott
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nothing like an anorak - thank you so much. Now to read up a few (of how many) local authority policies to see if this might be the case. They might not be aware of the exempt work rule as it is so obscurely phrased unless of course the staff were around during CTB and recognise the wording.

I would still like to hear if anybody has encountered any Permitted Work and Council Tax Support issues of any kind.
All best wishes

Judy Scott
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Judy Scott Consultancy

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Please HB Anorak
Looking up a couple of councils I discovered that there is a Council Tax Reduction Prescribed Requirements No 2885 and there are references to exempt work in it. Does this mean what I hope it means?

HB Anorak
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Only for pensioners.  The means-testing of working age claimants is left entirely up to the Council