Council Tax Reduction and Carers Allowance

Can I put this scenario before you:
Man and wife aged 62 and 58 respectively , he is getting £75.67 per week ESA Support group and £149.97 per week Occ pens. His wife gets £14 per week ESA income based. They have £9000 savings. Mr W has applied for PIP and should be entitled we are just waiting for a decision. They are home owners. They have applied for and been awarded full CT Redn on a Band B property. My question is if Mr W gets his PIP Care component is there any merit in Mrs W claiming Carers Allowance? It may be the end of her income based ESA but would it affect their full CT redn adversely?  (Mrs W would not qualify for PIP.)

If Mrs claims CA, she could presumably be paid and the irESA award would include a carer addition. If this takes them out of irESA, they will no longer be passported to CT support.

The details of this depend on the LA scheme being operated in your area, but based on the assumption that the rules are similar to the old CTB rules, the couple could qualify for a reduced amount of support. As it’s tariffed off at 20%, on the face of it, it looks like they’d be better off claiming CA than not. Also, check whether the IS award would be more generous (couple disability premium more generous than the ESA component).

Do you have access to QBC/Ferret? This should deal with the calculations, but it doesn’t always pick up the ESA/IS distinction, so perhaps do the calcs manually.

Assuming the local scheme is of conventional design (i.e. an income taper and traditional applicable amount), their CTR could reduce slightly but they’ll still be better off over all.  If their income is currently £14 below the ESA applicable amount, the combined effect of an award of CA and the increased applicable amount would be to raise their income a few pounds over the applicable amount and so they would become a “standard” CTR case.  If the CTR applicable amount is the same as the ESA one, there will be a small taper - but nothing like as much as the increase in their income.

There might even be a way to avoid any CTR loss at all.  This may be one of those situations where it makes a difference who is the CTR applicant and who is the partner.  Is the wife also LCW?  (I guess she must be if she is the ESA claimant).  If she is, it won’t make any difference.  If she’s not LCW and if he gets top-whack PIP(dl), they’ll be better off with her as the CTR applicant and should still qualify for the maximum because the couple rate of Disability and Enhanced Disability premium will far outstrip the support component they currently get.

But only if the local CTR scheme is of conventional design with large parts of the default rules on premiums etc adopted.  Cannot stress that too much.

Thanks for your replies , can you tell me what LCW means please? And also if the couple approach their local council and ask if claiming CA would be more beneficial than not doing so ( once we see what the PIP award is)  , would the council be able to advise them?

LCW means officially on the sick - eligible in principle for ESA (“limited capability for work”).

Council should be able to do better off/what if illustrations.  I think most of the HB/CTR processing systems include this function

Cheers.

Just to add to the above

(1) South Lakeland (if this is the LA) apply the default scheme (uprated) - so the above comments will apply.

(2) He’ll be reaching pension credit age soon (in the next sixteen weeks) if he hasn’t already.