My client is British but her spouse has no recourse to public funds. Client claimed JSA as a single person, but his claim was refused because the wife does not have NINO. She cannot get NINO because she does not have any ID or letter about her status. She lost all her documents when she came to the UK. They are not able to get any document from their home country.
The couple have requested documents from Home Office long time ago but they did not receive any information yet. The wife is pregnant, they do not have any income and HB+CTB stopped recently and the council asked to him to repay HB+CTB the date she arrived to UK.
Cl still signs at local jobcentre without getting payment. Therefore he cannot make fresh claim, even he does it is obvious it will be refused because of not to have NINO.
Please let me know if you can find any solution for his case. Thanks in advance.

Hi

The Court of Appeal has confirmed that a spouse with no recourse to public funds does have to satisfy the NINO requirement (judgment reported in R(H)7/06). In the facts of that case, the spouse didn't satisfy the requirement because she hadn't actually applied for a NINO (paras 42-44).

I don't know if your clent's wife has applied. If not, I think she should. Should give as information her Home Office reference if she has one, or her husband's, and ask the DWP to contact the Home Offce. You can argue that they have a duty to do this following the House of Lords case in Kerr which held that gathering information was a collaberative process between the claimant and the DWP, particularly where the claimant was unable to get information themselves. Alternatively, the client could go down to the Home Office to get the information if that's possible.

If wife applied for NINO and told them about Home Ofice before date of decision to refuse benefit should appeal against refusal on the basis that she had satisifed NINO requirement and that they could have got info from Home Office.

Otherwise should put in application for NINO and put in fresh claim for IS and HB/CTB on basis that NINO requirement now fulfilled.

What does anyone else think?

Yes, I agree with the interpretation of Kerr. Paragraph 62 of the Judgement states “(w)hat emerges from all this is a co-operative process of investigation in which both the claimant and the department play their part. The department is the one which knows what questions it needs to ask and what information it needs to have in order to determine whether the conditions of entitlement have been met. The claimant is the one who generally speaking can and must supply that information. But where the information is available to the department rather than the claimant, then the department must take the necessary steps to enable it to be traced”
Note, the use of the word must in the final sentence.

thanks a lot Roas and Nevip