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ESA - contributory or income related?
How can you tell if a client is in receipt of contributory or income related ESA?
I understand that a client can be in receipt of either or both, but in order to assess eligibility for a scheme, they must prove that they are in receipt of income based ESA, which is generally proved with their award letter.
However, the problem i am finding is with the letters that say “we call this contributory based and income related employment and support allowance”. My understanding of this is that they are entitled to both contribution based and income related. However, i came across a gentleman that had a letter stating this, he was in receipt of £91.40. But when i checked his incomings he had a £2,500 per month private pension. With this, it would be very unlikely he would be entitled to any income based ESA (there was no entitlement to any SDP/CP etc.), it would all be Contributory Based.
Any advice on this would be greatly appreciated!
If the client does not know themselves and it’s not obvious from other information, then a quick call to Jobcentreplus usually works.
“....when i checked his incomings he had a £2,500 per month private pension…”
On that basis I doubt he’d get Contribution Based either. Unless I’m wrong.
half of his occ pen would be £240 which would be deducted fromhis Contribution Based ESA.
It needs looking at further I think
yes - i did think there was something strange going on with this client. will look into it further!
If the client does not know themselves and it’s not obvious from other information, then a quick call to Jobcentreplus usually works.
But this does not always work either. I have been told several times that a client uis getting both irESA and crESA when they are getting £65.45 per week.
...and indeed, that they are getting one of them, when they are clearly getting the other.
Personally I would write to them and ask for clarification, I know that this takes time but the telephone staff don’t know! It could be that your client is in receipt of both.
this one has been solved - they were getting a work pension and this did in fact make them not eligible for ESA (IR or CB). have advised client to contact ESA to ensure correct info held.
i did speak to ESA about this and they are very unclear about what the wording on their letters actually mean - it is really not as clear as JSA award letters are to distinguish between the two.
my new understanding is that the wording on the first page is a correct indication of the type of ESA, and to ignore the wording on page 3/4. For example, it can say on the front page “this assessment is based on your national insurance contribution record” yet on the back page say “we call this contributory based and income related ESA”, so the front page suggests one type of ESA, while the back page is suggesting it is both types, when it is quite clearly ESA (CB) (based on the clients circumstances).