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Forum Home  →  Discussion  →  Universal credit migration  →  Thread

Claimant moved back to ESA/HB following threat of JR for misadvice to claim UC

Daphne
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Interesting post from Leigh Day solicitors who have managed to use a pre-action letter to get a terminally ill man moved back on to ESA/HB after being misadvised he had to claim UC when he moved house (within LA area)

SarahJBatty
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Presumably this is a case of the SDP being lost with no ‘transitional protection’ being available during ‘natural migration’ ...

Daphne
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Yes that’s how I read it - and in a case where there was no need for natural migration

Jon (CANY)
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We’ve seen a case where tax credit claimants with £16K+ savings were (it seems) wrongly advised that they must claim UC in order to get c-ESA… anyone have thoughts on the merits of referring on for legal advice? The above case reads like the JR was against the DWP, and HB just fell into line, I wonder if HMRC would be so obliging?

Daphne
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Written answer yesterday responding to query about how many sdps were included in awards in April 2017. Unfortunately they don’t keep stats for ESA which is where the majority will be so not of enormous use…

HB Anorak
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90 SPC claims with the Disability Premium? How?

Paul_Treloar_AgeUK
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HB Anorak - presumably this would be a severe disability addition which is payable with PC?

Daphne - that link won’t work for me. eta - just realised it’s another Firefox problem and link works ok in Chrome.

[ Edited: 17 Jan 2018 at 02:14 pm by Paul_Treloar_AgeUK ]
past caring
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Paul_Treloar_AgeUK - 17 January 2018 01:31 PM

HB Anorak - presumably this would be a severe disability addition which is payable with PC?

Daphne - that link won’t work for me.

You can’t see the link Paul - but the figures do distinguish between Disability Premium and SDP (there are more than 500,000 of the latter).

HB - I imagine it is limited to mixed age couples where the one below pension age has incapacity for work (not limited capability for work) and has had continuously since before 27/10/2008 - when ESA came in? But that’s a guess.

Lee Forrest
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Daphne - 10 October 2017 10:02 AM

Interesting post from Leigh Day solicitors who have managed to use a pre-action letter to get a terminally ill man moved back on to ESA/HB after being misadvised he had to claim UC when he moved house (within LA area)

We helped a client do the same- but didn’t need a pre-action letter from a solicitor

JSA to UC claimant lost around £90 per week following ‘advice’ to claim UC from JCP. They (obviously- it was £390 short) noticed the loss of income when they received their first UC payment. After being assisted with a complaint, and two assessment periods later, they are back on JSA/ HB with missing premiums backdated. Where there’s a will, there’s a lobster pot that can be broken open.

Job Centre Plus needs to be cautious when discussing Universal Credit with clients.  Casual (or not) conversations with claimants about UC, and the virtues of it from a DWP perspective, may be misinterpreted as advice to claim it.

Any conversation JCP has with a legacy benefit client about UC (when there is no natural migration involved) should include the advice to get independent advice and/ or a better off calculation carried out if they are seriously considering claiming.

If similar things happen, by mistake or by design, does UC not yet have the functionality to include a transitional protection, the same as we will see under managed migration (rather than the threat of legal action)? Of course, there may be lots of other reasons (apart from money) why an unnecessary switch to UC is problematic to the customer.

 

 

 

[ Edited: 17 Jan 2018 at 04:39 pm by Lee Forrest ]
Stuart
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Alok Sharma, giving evidence to the Work and Pensions Committee, said he will reflect on issue of claimants with SDP and EDP being losers in natural migration -

Q382 ... It is quite difficult to estimate how many people this might affect. Just intuitively, I would think that a lot of those who are getting the severe disability premium right now will be managed-migrated, but I do understand the point you are making and it is something that I want to reflect on.

... and Neil Couling, when asked if DWP has undetaken any modelling of the impact on claimants -.

Q387/8… There is high-level work on natural migrations, but not at a granularity that will allow you to identify a component of somebody’s benefit here. We have three benefits in which the severe disability premium can be paid: Jobseeker’s Allowance, Employment Support Allowance and Income Support. We have interactions between the three….. We are reflecting on this. What I am saying is I cannot give him at the moment a precise idea of the exact number of people we think will be affected.

http://data.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/committeeevidence.svc/evidencedocument/work-and-pensions-committee/universal-credit-rollout/oral/77596.html

 

SamW
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stuart - 29 January 2018 05:03 PM

Alok Sharma, giving evidence to the Work and Pensions Committee, said he will reflect on issue of claimants with SDP and EDP being losers in natural migration -

Q382 ... It is quite difficult to estimate how many people this might affect. Just intuitively, I would think that a lot of those who are getting the severe disability premium right now will be managed-migrated, but I do understand the point you are making and it is something that I want to reflect on.

... and Neil Couling, when asked if DWP has undetaken any modelling of the impact on claimants -.

Q387/8… There is high-level work on natural migrations, but not at a granularity that will allow you to identify a component of somebody’s benefit here. We have three benefits in which the severe disability premium can be paid: Jobseeker’s Allowance, Employment Support Allowance and Income Support. We have interactions between the three….. We are reflecting on this. What I am saying is I cannot give him at the moment a precise idea of the exact number of people we think will be affected.

http://data.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/committeeevidence.svc/evidencedocument/work-and-pensions-committee/universal-credit-rollout/oral/77596.html

You have to worry when somebody as supposedly senior as Neil Couling doesn’t know that the SDP will also included in the HB calculation for people working too many hours for JSA/ESA/IS but not enough to cover their rent. Exactly the type of people who UC was supposed to be encouraging when it was originally being ‘sold’. I wonder if anybody will bother to correct him (what is the process to correct incorrect evidence given to a parliamentary committee?). Anybody with an account fancy tweeting him?

clive
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I know it doesn’t solve the loss of SDP levels, but surely they don’t have get so ‘granular’ FGS! (That’s ‘for goodness sake’ btw). They could just include transitional protection, and make sure all staff are aware of the rules.

Benny Fitzpatrick
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What Mr Couling is actually saying, without the waffle and business-speak, is “No, we didn’t think about that, like so many other aspects of the UC mess”.

Alice SF
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Re the Leigh Day case, is this misadvice by the DWP or by a third party?

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Jon (CHDCA) - 13 October 2017 05:07 PM

We’ve seen a case where tax credit claimants with £16K+ savings were (it seems) wrongly advised that they must claim UC in order to get c-ESA… anyone have thoughts on the merits of referring on for legal advice? The above case reads like the JR was against the DWP, and HB just fell into line, I wonder if HMRC would be so obliging?

We have come across a similar case where WTC stopped because the claimant was wrongly advised by DWP to claim UC instead of New Style ESA. Any advice for my client?