Service Charges for Owner Occupiers - Waiting Period Query

Hi All,

I have a client who is an owner occupier (with no mortgage) however she has extremely high Service Charge costs.

She was previously in receipt of ESA made up of both Contribution and Income-Related - and this had been the case from at least April 2021. She never received service charges within her ESA (IR) and as far as I can tell she never requested support for these service charges. She has been on Enhanced/Enhanced PIP for many years.

I haven’t been able to gather why she actually moved to UC, I am still worried that this is because someone advised her that she could only get support with these Service Charges through UC and not ESA. However, she moved over to UC at the beginning of March 24.

She was supported by someone at the Job Centre to make the online claim, and because of a confusion of what the accommodation is, they had told her to put the accommodation down as “Supported Accommodation” - and they advised her to claim HB for what they believed were Housing Costs. HB then rejected her claim, due to it being Service Charges that she was actually looking for support with. She was referred to the service that I work for - and I supported her to correctly update her claim to let UC know that she is an Owner Occupier with Eligible Service Charges.

She is continuing to get the ESA CB as well as her UC payments.

I was aware that there is the 9 month waiting period before Service Charges can be paid for Owner Occupiers, but I thought that maybe her time on ESA would count towards the 9 months.

UC have come back to us on the clients journal to say;
“You do need to serve the 9 months waiting period as your Employment Support Allowance is still ongoing.
The waiting period does not apply if your claim to Employment and Support Allowance had ended within 1 month of Universal Credit claim starting..
We will be able to reassess this on the xxxxx to see if you qualify for the service charges.”

Q) Is any of the above actually right? I can’t seem to find what they are referencing within any regs or guidance.

Looking at CPAG it suggests; “If you are entitled to ‘new-style’ contribution-based JSA or contributory ESA, immediately before your award of UC starts, any period when you were only getting one of those benefits may be treated as an assessment period (or part of an assessment period) that counts towards your waiting period.”

Q) Does this not apply to her because she was also getting some IR ESA or because she was getting PIP? There isn’t any mention here about the need for the ESA to end for this to count?

There is another point in CPAG around IR IS, ESA or JSA - where it mentions if you had applied for help with the service charges in one of those benefits and were having the waiting period applied, that anytime waiting already would be counted as part of the UC waiting period.

Q) The client doesn’t think she request this, but probably had been liable for the last 4 years, but I can’t imagine when she reported her change of address to ESA - that they would be something to trigger them asking if she had these service charges. It also isn’t something that I think most clients are even aware that they can apply for help with on ESA. Could there be scope for an anytime revision?

Any other help or guidance is appreciated, as this client is really struggling with her finances as these service charges have increased by £600 per year for the last two years in a row.

Thanks in advance!!!

They are referring to Reg 29 of the UC (Transitional Provisions) Regs 2014 which provides for wholly or partly served waiting periods for housing costs to be carried over from ESA.

The bit about ESA ending within the month down to the date of the UC claim is a misunderstanding of Reg 29(1)(a): what it actually says is that you must have been entitled to ESA within that month - in most cases the claimant will have been entitled throughout that month, but they are also covered if their ESA had already ended as long as it wasn’t more than a month ago.  It doesn’t mean that ESA must have ended before the date of the UC claim.

But if DWP was completely unaware of her housing costs for ESA purposes, it is hard to see how there is anything to carry over.

Ok thanks.

Is there a difference in how the waiting period rules work depending on whether the ESA was IR or CB though? Or does one trump the other, when someone is in receipt of both, like this client?

As within CPAG handbook;
-it suggests that if one CB ESA only, anytime on this can be counted as part of the UC waiting period (as obviously you cannot claim the Service charges on CB ESA)
-whereas it suggests that you needed to have applied for this on IR ESA for either an immediate transfer (if already getting service charges paid) or a reduction of the UC waiting period (if currently in a waiting period within IR ESA before moving over to UC)

Is she unable to use the CB ESA rule, because she also got some IR ESA?
If not, can she try and go back to IR ESA and ask for a revision? If she told the DWP that she had moved, shouldn’t it be up to them to ask 1) are you an owner occupier, 2) do you have any eligible service charges?
If they didn’t do this, should it be on the claimant to know that they can get these service charges on ESA?

The ESA(c) thing won’t help here - that’s in Schedule 5 to the UC Regs, where any reference to ESA or JSA refers to new-style only, which your client obviously does not have (or didn’t before she claimed UC anyway).

She’ll have to hope she can find some way of re-opening the ESA(ir) award for a period before she claimed UC