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As Tony Bowman says, we are all so bogged down with our workload and increasingly stringent LSC contract terms that any campaigning on Tax Credits will have to be done outside of office hours, as well as within work time.
I'm in favour of using the courts and the law to assert claimants rights, as it's what I know works most consistently.
I almost got a tax credit appeal heard recently, the Tax Credits Office ducked it again, but only after they'd had to make a concession to the client.
I had a client with an overpayment, because although she had told the TCO by letter that she had split from her partner, they didn't act on the change of circs until she sent in her tax credit renewal form the following tax year. The client did not contact them again when her tax credits payments did not change, because she supposed (correctly) that with her partner gone, and the household income considerably reduced, she would be entitled to at least the same amount of tax credits.
The following tax year, she then got an overpayment demand for about £4,000.
While you cannot appeal about overpayments, you can appeal about entitlement. On the basis that if the TCO tells somebody they've been overpaid then they must have reviewed that person's entitlement at some point, I sent an appeal saying that the TCO had miscalculated this claimant's entitlement. Of course the TCO do not send out a decision letter like the DWP does, so I took the date on the overpayment demand as the date of the decision (giving the claimant one month from that date in which to appeal) and took an educated guess as to which of the clauses listed in section 38 of the Tax Credit Act the decision on entitlement would have been made under: probably 16(1).
I got a standard letter back from the TCO saying "you can't appeal about an overpayment and we are now going to close this file."
I wrote back reiterating that it was an appeal about somebody's entitlement, explained why I thought there was a right of appeal under section 38, and also stating that they should not close the file down just yet because they would be in breach of the Human Rights Act article 6 (right to a fair trial) and we were prepared to apply for a judicial review on the subject.
What the TCO did next was to write back saying they had made a new decision and had backdated the claimant's tax credit claim by three months (which is the longest possible). Since they have made a new decision the appeal lapses.
I could have made a new appeal, but I subsequently discovered the appeal would not have "had legs". If a couple making a joint claim for tax credits split up, the claim is terminated. The TCO can't legally continue to pay them anything until one or other of them makes a new single claim for tax credits. Pity nobody told our claimant this when she first reported a change of circumstances.
The point is, I managed to get half of her overpayment wiped out by exercising her rights under the law. It took a very close, and headache-inducing, study of the Tax Credits Law handbook but what I discovered, worked.
I think rights workers need to pursue a strategy of using tax credit law as much as possible to assert clients rights, backed up by going to judicial review to assert rights under the Human Rights Act. We should perhaps also be looking for a test case to take to the Court of Appeal on the matter of claimants not having appeal rights.
I think of this task as being somewhat like that of the prisoner in The Shawshank redemption, who took 19 years to dig his way out of jail armed only with a geology hammer. Or, since I'm from Liverpool, as like trying to bring down the Canada Dock wall armed only with the same tool. But think how wonderful it will be when we've finally removed enough bricks to bring the entire edifice tumbling down!
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