I would like some advice please if anyone can help.

A client recieved £33,000 in February because his father passed away. Within four months all the money had gone. On one of his statements he took out £25,000 in one go and three days later he was taking more money out again. He has since told me that he had debt's to pay off. He can only account for £6000 through reciepts and invoices. He now has no money left and he is unable to get any benefits because they want to know the ins and outs of all his expenditure. My client has serious mental health issues as well as being an alcoholic and i feel that over the last year he has been taken advantage of by so called friends, who he has lent money too but not got anything to show for it. he does have a social worker but my client doesn't want him to know anything. if anyone has had too deal with anything similar or know best plan of action your help would be most grateful.

many thanks
Matt

It's going to be very difficult!
The bottom line is that DWP are going to want an explanation which accounts for the disposal of the capital with some kind of verification or at least avenues they can investigate to verify his story, or lack of story in this case.

The fact he has mental health issues, may or may not be of help; has he an appointee or power of attorney, if not his mental health may not carry much weight.

Has he knowledge of the capital rules, presumably he has.

If he has support workers they really do need to get involved, because if he really does not have the money anymore, and his benefit has been disallowed, then he needs as much help as possible in convincing the DWP he has not disposed of the capital in order to continue to receive benefit.

He is only recieving DLA. He hasn't been recieving any other benefits and because he has no money left he tried to put in a claim for ESA. Is there a standard amount of time that they will take last years money into account? Also he is adamant that he doesn't want his support worker involved. Are there ways around this?

The big question is: did he know that having this money would affect any entitlement to benefit? Deprivation involves doing it with an intention of getting benefit (not necessarily the primary intention). That would fix him with notional capital - treated as still having the money he hasn't got.

It will be difficult to show what has actually happened to the capital though: I think he has a worse problem with proving actual capital.

Time is vaguley relevant in notional capital cases, since the bigger the gap between the disposal of the capital and any claim for benefits the less likely it is that the disposal was linked to an intention of claiming benefit. Doesn't becoem time-expired, though, where the claim is already made. However a future calim - at a date when it would be quite reasonable for him to ahve spent the money in the interim - might succeed.

I presume he isn't over 59, as then paying debts would not be deprivation anyway.

Hi,

I had a similar case. My client got through £35 thousand in about 9 months with not a single receipt to show for it, and was refused IS. He was an alcoholic, but did not have any diagnosed MH problems. He was vague about where the money had gone, and had a habit of giving different answers to the same questions due to memory problems caused by the alcoholism.

We argued that he had basically spent it in the pub, he had been in the pub every day, buying rounds and meals for everyone, and people were taking advantage of him by borrowing money from him knowing that he would not remember.

We won the IS appeal, although I think with a certain amount of luck - we couldn’t have had a better chair. At the end of the day the rather depressing reality of it is more convincing than some far fetched and complex plot to spend tens of thousands in order to be able to claim a pittance of benefit.

Good luck.

I have had a similar experience with an appeal just before Christmas. The DWP only wanted the Tribunal to decide whether or not the money had been spent and the issue of deprivation wasn't raised by either them or the judge. The case was very similar and it seemed a very good example of all parties taking a pragmatic rather than strictly legalistic view of a vulnerable person and their difficulties.