Hardship payment recovery

Does anyone have a link to the DWP’s Debt Management Guide?

The Advice for Decision Makers refers to it in relation to the recovery of hardship payments of UC.

I have a client who is having his UC reduced by 40% to recover hardship payments, (he was sanctioned for 3 months).  The regs refer to recovery at ‘not more than’ 40% but I can’t find any guidance on what factors the DWP would take into account to reduce this to a lower percentage.

The client is a vulnerable young adult, previously in care with a history of suicide attempts and self harm and I am very concerned about his ability to survive for another 4.5 months on less than £45pw.

Thanks

JayKay - 21 August 2018 12:52 PM

Does anyone have a link to the DWP’s Debt Management Guide?

The Advice for Decision Makers refers to it in relation to the recovery of hardship payments of UC.

I have a client who is having his UC reduced by 40% to recover hardship payments, (he was sanctioned for 3 months).  The regs refer to recovery at ‘not more than’ 40% but I can’t find any guidance on what factors the DWP would take into account to reduce this to a lower percentage.

The client is a vulnerable young adult, previously in care with a history of suicide attempts and self harm and I am very concerned about his ability to survive for another 4.5 months on less than £45pw.

Thanks

For recovery purposes hardship payments are treated in the same way as a fraudulent overpayment so the maximum recovery rate of 40% of the standard allowance always applies while the hardship payment is being recovered (in other non-fraud cases overpayments can’t be recovered at more than 25% of the standard allowance). Not all of the amount being deducted may be applied to recovering the hardship payment if higher priority deductions are also being made.

The effect of all this is that someone who is sanctioned and receives hardship payments will have to cope living on 60% of the standard allowance for 2½ times as long as the sanction period (and longer if there are other higher priority deductions being made from their UC).

It may be possible to argue for a lower rate of recovery as is possible with any overpayment recovery but I would not expect that to be straightforward. The CPAG WBTC handbook suggests (page 1250) that such requests are treated on their merits and that to argue that the rate of recovery would cause hardship a full income and expenditure statement would usually be required.