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What kind of income?
Client receives 120pw from her 2 adult daughters in return for providing childcare for her grandchildren. This income is currently being treated as ‘miscellaneous’ with no disregards.
Should client at least be getting an earnings disregard on this money? Could she even argue that these are voluntary payments that should be completely disregarded?
I cannot see how these can be classed as voluntary payments - those are defined as payments made for which the person making the payment gets nothing back in return, which is certainly not the case here (assuming the daughters would not carry on giving her the £120 p/w if she said she was no longer going to look after the grandchildren?).
And whilst there are earnings disregards for employed and self-employed persons, there aren’t income disregards. If the financial arrangement is a purely informal, family one (i.e. there is no employee/employer relationship and your client is not carrying out a self-employed business as a childminder) then I think it’s right that the money is simply treated as income - without disregards.
If your client was genuinely self-employed, she should benefit from the generous disregard rules for childminders, that allow two thirds of the earnings to be disregarded in lieu of expenses (HB reg 38(9), there is an equivalent for PC age).
That’s true.
But it would require that she was actually engaged in the business of childminding (i.e. held herself out as a childminder, advertised her services and was prepared to take on children of members of the public and not just of immediate family members) which would, at least in practice, I think, mean that she would need to be OFSTED registered.