Council Tax Reduction and exempt work (UC)

Any local authority running a David Airey scheme should be disregarding earnings from exempt work, unless they have asked for a bespoke tweak to avoid doing so.  There are a lot of them, predominantly in the south west but you find them everywhere.

Paragraph 15A of a standard Airey scheme engages the earnings disregards in Schedule 3 for UC claimants, and para 10 of Schedule 3 applies to earnings from exempt work.

If your local authority s running the pure default scheme, at least as regards income assessment, then yes it can seem a bit harsh.  It’s important to add up income from all sources including earnings and benefits before making any better off/worse off judgements, but exempt work is one of the easy ones: fully disregarded earnings = top whack legacy benefits, so a lot of those people will be down a bit on UC.

Hi,

New account, I have moved from Disability Nottinghamshire and didn’t realise my account was at my old employer.

Thanks for your prompt response. I have no idea whether it is a David Airey Scheme and looking at the Councils scheme it would appear that it is not as I can’t find the paragraphs to which you refer.

I have attached the scheme details, I can’t see that it is much different from the default scheme, but if you know what to look for, and have time to do so, I would be grateful if you could advise me.

OK, that’s a conventional default scheme as far as income in a UC case goes.

Chapter 3, Para 37 determines how income is calculated in a UC case and it completely by-passes the disregard schedules.  Schedule 7 is engaged by paras 52 and 61 of the scheme which are in Chapter 5 and you just don’t visit Chapter 5 in a UC case.

Thank you very much for your time in looking at this for us.