Carer’s Element

Hi,
I have a couple, joint award, she is full time Carer and in receipt of Carers Allowance for partner ( which is deducted from monthly UC payment).
Client presumed that because this deduction was been made then UC were aware she was in receipt of Carers Allowance and thus full time carer.
As she did not report Change of Circumstances she is still in the wrong Work Group and not getting the Carer Element of UC- we have now reported this and hopefully her Work Group will change and Carers Element will be paid going forward.
Is there any scope to have this backdated to when Carers Allowance award began?

Many Thanks

The DWP computer will automatically pick up on CA receipt and deduct it from benefit, but the CE is dealt with separately and will only be added in where the claimant has made the relevant declaration on the claim - even though entitlement to the CE necessarily follows from entitlement to the CA. The computer is perfectly happy to allow someone to have the CA deducted without the CE being added in and it is something that you need to look out for.

You say that your client’s entitlement to CA was a change in circumstances rather than being something which applied from the start of the claim. The CE should therefore be effective as from the start of their CA entitlement. This is because it is an award of a qualifying benefit and para 31, sch 1 UC etc. (Decisions & Appeals) Regulations 2013 applies. Any delay in reporting the change of circumstances is completely irrelevant.

Note however that the process is that the Case Manager will add in the award going forward and it will only be backdated if approved by a Decision Maker. The CM will not always realise that they need to make the referral to a DM and you will need to persuade them to do so. For whatever reason, they always seem to get very tetchy about doing so.

See further this thread from a couple of days ago: https://www.rightsnet.org.uk/forums/viewthread/20034/

UC casemanagers will always ask on the Journal why a person hasn’t reported the change earlier, even though as Elliot points out there is no time limit to report an award of a ‘relevant benefit’ such as Carers Allowance. It’s annoying and can prolong the process for getting the correct arrears of the carers element.

CPAG wrote a really good briefing about this last year:
https://cpag.org.uk/sites/default/files/2024-01/Universal%20Credit%20for%20Carers.pdf

Also they wrote recently about the Disabled Child Element with which claimants have the same problems here:
https://cpag.org.uk/news/poor-data-sharing-dwp-short-changing-universal-credit-claimants