Underlying Carer Premium

I have a client who has a State Pension that pays £93 pw and his partner is on Attendance Allowance.

He made the application for Carer’s Allowance for the underlying premium entitlement.  But now the LA are assessing their Housing Benefit as him receiving the full Carer’s Allowance benefit and reducing their Housing Benefit.

I’ve queried this with them, but they’re saying it’s showing on their internal system Carer’s Allowance being in payment.

Am I missing something - it’s a low State Pension, but it should still be high enough for it just to be underlying entitlement?

I’m going to have to get Carers Allowance to send out an award letter to them as they didn’t receive it originally.

If you’re missing something, I am too - CA still overlaps with SRP, and the SRP in payment is still more than CA, so no CA is payable. Data entry error by the LA?

I’ve encountered this before. The DWP system (ATLAS?) that local authorities use to check benefit decisions isn’t always that clear and it can look like CA is in payment, when only underlying entitlement has been awarded. I’ve spoken to someone in HB about this and they said that there are different ways that the CA can be recorded by DWP and sometimes it can be misunderstood.

I agree, getting a copy of the CA decision letter showing the award of underlying entitlement and challenging the HB decision with this seems the way to proceed

Might still be this glitch from years ago, see page 3 of HB/CTB G4/2012.

I came across one last year, so I’m pretty sure it’s still there!

I came across this recently and we were able to resolve it by simply showing HB that Carers Allowance had not been paid. Bank statements or a Carers Allowance award letter showing that it hasn’t been awarded should do the trick. It seems to be a glitch in the way that the data is sent via ATLAS.