Genuine & effective work

This is a new one on us. We queried a £50 per week ‘notional income’ figure on an HB assessment letter. LA concerned has applied it in order to ‘top up’ the client’s part time earnings to £153.00 per week (she’s an EEA national) in order for her work to be treated as ‘genuine & effective’. This isn’t one of those ‘notional earnings’ cases where client is self employed (or being paid less than the going rate for her job). We’ve appealed against the decision but I would be interested to know if anyone has encountered similar. It seems such an odd thing to do. Surely either the LA is satisfied the client’s work as it stands is genuine & effective, or it isn’t. Applying a sort of ‘genuine & effective’ notional top-up seems bizarre.

Is this definitely HB and not CTR?  If it’s CTR there might be something in their scheme about assuming a certain amount of earnings in certain circumstances, as an alternative to outright refusal of CTR, but if it’s HB I agree there is no middle way - either it’s effective and genuine or it’s not, so it’s actual earnings or no HB at all.

Looks to me like someone’s badly misunderstood a DWP circular!  If someone is averaging that amount of earnings and has done for 3 months, then that’s the genuine and effective test met.  If not then the decision maker has to consider whether, in light of all the circumstances of the particular case, the work can be considered genuine and effective.  But that doesn’t mean you then “top up” their earnings to the threshold figure!

Thanks both. Yep- deffo HB rather than CTR. I agree actually- I think someone has somewhat misunderstood the circular (and hopefully it’ll be resolved fairly easily) but time will tell…