Claimant with 3 children advised to claim UC

Client failed ESA assessment and found fit for work in March 2018. Client claimed, and appears to be being paid UC (Full Service) from 04/04/2018. She has 3 dependent children aged 15 11 and 8.

How could this claim have been allowed to go ahead? Surely she should have been advised to claim legacy benefits?

She should have been unable to fill the form in. It asks you how many children you have and if you put 3 or more it won’t proceed

Exactly what I thought.

Nonetheless, it’s in payment (has been since 04/04/18) and is correctly calculated with 3 child elements!

Query has gone in on the client’s online journal as to how the claim came to be accepted, as I’m stumped.

Any chance at all she’s been on UC within the previous 6 months?

No. She has been on ESA(ir) with WRA for at least 12 months. Was advised by JCP telephony to claim UC after failing WCA.

Prior to ESA she was supported by her husband until they split due to DV.

Is she/should she be affected by the benefit cap and if so, are they applying it? Isn’t that the reason UC can’t deal with claims from people with 3+ children?

She is affected by the benefit cap (HB reduced from £95.25 to £92.20/week under legacy benefits), and they ARE applying it under UC. (Housing element reduced correspondingly).

The reason for the decision not to take UC claims from people with 3+ children was that the UC infrastructure apparently can’t differentiate between pre 06/04/17 children and post- 06/04/17 children. Given that the point of the “2 child policy” is to influence future behaviour (by persuading claimants not to have more kids), it was felt to be a bit unfair to apply it to people in respect of children they had before the policy was introduced.

There is an important point in all of this though. Establishing whether somebody is responsible for 3 or more children ought to be very very easy. Yet, apparently, some have fallen through the net.

In a couple of months, the DWP is planning to ask the same DWP/LA/HMRC staff to establish whether prospective claimants are eligible for the Severe Disability Premium - so that SDP-eligible people can be pointed towards legacy benefits and everyone else can be pointed towards UC. Figuring out if someone is entitled to the SDP is a lot more complicated than asking them to count their kids.  How confident can we be that this will work as intended?

“Well I get Armed Forces Independence Payment and my wife gets Disability Living Allowance but I don’t know the rates - she gets about £220 every 4 weeks. Nobody gets carers for me or my wife, but my wife is a carer for her niece who lives down the road. We live with our daughter who is blind but works full time and our son who gets ESA but I’m not sure about his other benefits. Our son has just got a council house so he will be moving out next week. I have no idea if we get the Severe Disability Premium or not”

I had this with a client - try as I might, I could not get a claim through when I input 3 children; my client told me that she was advised to ‘set up account’ and it worked (never did find out how and she had her interview at JC too to verify claim, no problems identified); luckily her claim hadn’t been processed and we withdrew it, and claimed tax credits (who originally told her she couldn’t claim, but didn’t bother to ask how many children she had) this was very important as there was about £400 difference in the amount on WTC/CTC and UC - 3 children on TC but only 2 to be included on UC as child born March 17.

We have also been told by our HB department that they have seen about 5 women, 29 weeks pregnant who have been told they cant claim UC??? told to claim IS - and IS have paid! - no idea how that works.

The thing is with UC, you can never advise anyone with any certainty as nothing works as it should !

We had a client in this situation too - had somehow had a claim accepted for UC despite having three children. Claim was definitely made after the April cut off date. UC are now insisting that the client re-pay all the UC she received as she ‘wasn’t entitled to it’ and arguing that it was their mistake isn’t going over well…

It gets better….......

Client asked for an explanation of how her claim was calculated. Only to be told by JCP that she “doesn’t need to know”.

I take this to mean that they don’t know either.