Missing SDP’s at point of migration - lost forever?

We have been seeing more and more people who should be receiving the sdp with their legacy benefit awards, but it is not in payment. It can take time and quite a bit of effort to get the sdp in payment, particularly if it’s something slightly out of the ordinary like our shared lives cases.

It seems more and more obvious that notifications on the DWP systems when a qualifying benefit has been awarded are not being actioned, claimant’s have no idea they will be entitled to extra money so don’t chase DWP. When these cases are migrated to UC they will have lost the sdp forever as it seems there is nothing in the Transitional Protection regulations to protect ‘entitlement’ to the sdp, only payment of it.

This issue doesn’t seem to be getting picked up or acknowledged by DWP - any ideas?

I haven’t had time to go into depth on the migration regs yet however…

A person gets transitional protection including the amount for SDP if they are:

63…entitled to an award of an existing benefit that includes a severe disability premium (“SDP”);
(b) during that month continues to satisfy the conditions for eligibility for an SDP; and

on my reading, if they’re entitled to it, whether or not they’re receiving it, the TA should be payable. Does it take a decision that they are entitled to it before entitlement arises?

I suspect this might have been aswered before but it’s my first hard think about this.

My reading of it is that as the award itself will not include the sdp, they fail to get TP to compensate for it. I don’t want to wait for the migration and have to try my luck at appeals - I’d rather the problem of so many claimants not having a correct benefit award be dealt with first, then migration - or if need be a correct assessment at the point of migration with the right of MR/appeal if we later pick up an error and the sdp was wrongly refused.