Has anyone seen figures anywhere for the number of people not currently getting PC, HB or CTB who will become entitled to one or other of these benefits because of the increase in the lower limit from £6,000 to £10,000 (i.e. excluding people who would qualify now but have just not claimed)? I've seen figures for how many current recipients will be better off but was wondering if any kind of impact assessment (?) has been done to estimate how many potential new entitlements there would be.

It must be a very difficult thing to estimate. I cant think of an easy way of fiding out who has capital between 6 and 10k and hasn't made a claim. Having said that, 6% of our pensioners will benefit from the change.

The Pension Service recently did a takeup excercise for CTB/HB, which resulted in no extra new claims in our area. All the new claims we did get weren't included in the list they sent us anyway!

Judging by our experience here, we havent had any pensioner claims recently that have not qualified for any other reason than capital exceeding the limit. We tend to find that pensioners either qualify for HB/CTB, or they have too much capital.

from the explanatory memorandum to the regs ....

'It is estimated that around half a million Pension Credit customers around 200,000 Council Tax Benefit customers and around 50,000 Housing Benefit customers will see an increase in their entitlement following this change.

This change is also likely to make some people newly entitled to these benefits and it is estimated that there could be around 20,000 new claims to Pension Credit, around 20,000 new claims to Council Tax Benefit and less than 5,000 new claims to Housing Benefit.'

http://www.opsi.gov.uk/si/si2009/em/uksiem_20091676_en.pdf

(there's also some figures in HB/CTB Circular A17/2009)

nb ..... just spotted that they're going to make a one-off extra statutory payment of £40 to those who lose out ... see today's rightsnet news

the dwp have now also published an Equality Impact Assessment @

http://www.dwp.gov.uk/docs/pension-credit-and-hb-ctb-eia.pdf

Has anyone heard if there will also be a change for local authorities assessments of capital when charging for care?
I was asked this by someone on a training course I was running yesterday who does assessments for a local authority in london. The local authority's lower tariff capital in England at the moment is £13,750. (Still more generous than new £10,000 lower capital limit) I am assuming it is staying the same.

On a slightly different tack from Care charging, there was a posting on the 15th from Richard - reproduced below - which pointed out the anomaly for which Local Authorities are going to be allowed to make one off payments of £40: ie it's going to have a albeit small detrimental effect on their HB/CTB and here's a little compensation in lieu ...............there is a recent HB circular to that effect ......


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Dolge



Senior Adviser, Wirral Welfare Rights Unit
Member since 07th Sep 2009

Capital disregard changes and fairer charging
Tue 15-Sep-09 04:14 PM

Someone has brought this little anomaly to my attention and I was wondering if anyone else had noticed it:
1. when PC capital limits increase to £10,000 in November the effect on GC will be a straight increase of £8pw for people with enough tarrif income.
2. However for Savings Credit it will be more complicated. Since tarrif income is a qualifying income for SC, the qualifying income will go down by £8. This results in a drop of up to £4.80 in your SC.
3. The overall effect will be, for people with SC through tarrif income, that they get a total increase of £3.20 with £4.80 being in effect transferred from SC to GC.
4. Fair enough, they're still better off. But now consider Fairer Charging Guidance which requires (para.27) that all SC is disregarded. Effectively you are transferring £4.80 from SC (where it is disregarded for Fairer Charging) to GC (where it counts).
5. If you are paying charges for a non-residential care package (say at 75% of excess income which is the figure here in Wirral), you then get a £3.20 increase in your overall PC and a £6 increase in your charges (because your chargeable income has gone up by £8: £3.20 actual increase, £4.80 transferred from SC to GC).

If others agree with the analysis, any suggestions where we can take this up?

Richard Atkinson