Thought you’d heard it all?

Just been asked about a case where the claimant is receiving both UC and income-related ESA.  You heard me right.  DWP has alighted on the innovative solution of deducting the ESA from the UC as income.

I have asked them to check if that is really true, but if it is it’s a new one on me

Think I’ve posted before about the UC claims we’ve seen taking Pension Credit into account as income. It’s really good to see the simplification agenda doing so well…..

Well at least the claimants (probably) haven’t faced the simplification that all overpayments are recoverable?
We’ve has cases where both UC and PC were in payment for months (due to issues around a dependent child addition in PC v CTC & wrong advice from DWP/HMRC)!

I think this is correct - see Reg 10 of UC (Transitional Provision) regs 2014.

My case was a gentleman who continued to be paid HB for a month after being migrated to UC. Both payments going direct to HA landlord. In terms of recoverability, had that situation gone on for longer (so that his housing association was actually receiving both UC and HB at the same time) I would have been arguing that any further o/p should have been recoverable from the landlord.

This isn’t one of your Reg 10 overlapping payments: these are two concurrent awards, the claimant remains on ESA and UC as well.  I guess the fix works - as you say, it’s no different from what would happen if they identified an overlapping payment retrospectively after ESA ended.  But really ESA should have stopped immediately when the UC claim was made.