ESA and backdating 8 years!

Good Morning,

I wonder if you can help - I have a client who has special educational needs, from what her Father has said she was in receipt of benefits eight years ago and Mum at that time was assisting her daughter with her claim. She has recently passed away.

Dad is 84 years of age, he says that his daughter was assessed for LCWRA however was found ‘fit for work’ this was eight years ago and I am not sure what went wrong but her claim ceased at that time, at which point Mum and Dad financially cared for their daughter.

What is the best way for me to proceed?

I am hoping to reopen her ESA claim via a decision maker and request backdated payments - has anyone had any experience with this and any guidance you can provide will be appreciated. 

You have said that the ESA award was ended because she was found fit for work (i.e. not to have LCW) 8 years ago. This is a perfectly credible explanation for her entitlement ending and any appeal rights against that decision would have expired long ago. It would have been open to her to make a new claim for ESA or JSA at some later stage. As a result of the UC rollout, the new claim would now need to be for UC, so I would be advising her to make a claim asap.

The only real basis on which the claimant could sensibly hope to get 8 years of backdated ESA payments is if they could demonstrate that the decision to end ESA was based on official error. i.e. some sort of mistake in DWP administration meant that they ended the entitlement when they shouldn’t have. An example would be if entitlement was incorrectly ended because the claimant’s 365 days of contributory ESA ran out and nobody assessed whether they were entitled to irESA. None of the information in your initial post is really suggestive that there was official error in this case, but if the claimant wanted to explore the possibility further, the starting point would be to ask for their ESA records via Subject Access Request.