UC Housing Costs Element disregarded as income when calculating CTS award?

Morning all!

I have a client on Universal Credit (no earned income).

We have made a claim for Council Tax Support. Lambeth council have calculated that the client has no entitlement because her income is too high.

When calculating the clients income however, they have included the full housing costs element of UC as part of her income. I am assuming this has to be incorrect however I cannot find the any regs. that state that the housing cost element of UC is disregarded as income when calculating entitlement to CTS.

Has anyone come across this?

When asking for a revision of this decision anyone know what regs./DMG I would need to refer to? I don’t think I have ever asked for a revision of a CTS decision!

Hope someone can help!

Tom

In a conventional CTR scheme, anyone on UC without earned income qualifies for full CTR.  Also, if the claimant has earnings, the amount of the housing element (or even whether there is one at all) does not affect CTR - it balances on both sides of the calculation.  For a given amount of income you qualify for the same amount of CTR irrespective of housing costs.

So there are two possibilities:

- Lambeth has a weird CTR scheme, or
- they have made a mistake

Will check out their scheme and get back to you.

Agree with HBA.

Certainly Lambeth’s CTRS adopted the default scheme approach back in 2013 http://bit.ly/2FL6UqP - see paras 28 and 37 -  as far as I know it hasn’t changed in this respect. 

I get the impression that whilst the CTRS policies for UC claimants are (in most cases) fairly simple, the way they’ve been bolted on to some former HB+CTB admin systems sounds a though it’s a bit clunky and so possibly more prone to error.