Self-employment and ‘corrections’ taking place on UC calculation

A message is appearing on journals across the UK that states that DWP will be ‘correcting’  UC calculations for people who are gainfully-self-employed who have a working partner - and those corrections will most likely lead to a reduction in benefit. The message says that this will be done sometime over the next two months and it doesn’t give any more information than that. Does anyone have any information about this exercise - what’s behind it, what the correction is, whether DWP are backdating the correction to create overpayments etc.

Also referred to in this weeks MSE Forum   https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/80272416#Comment_80272416

Hi

We have just come across this and asked DWP for more info. From what we have seen online, it appears to be linked to joint claims where there is a S/E person subject to the MIF and the other partner gets PAYE income. It appears the income used in the calculations may have been too low - the suggestion we saw is that the PAYE earnings were ignored.

LITRG

Thanks for sharing both .. we’ve also added to today’s rightsnet news:

DWP making ‘corrections’ to how it calculates earnings for couples where one is ‘gainfully self-employed’ and the other has earnings

On a related point, do people think there is a “couple threshold” for the MIF in cases where the partner falls within s.19 of the Act for reasons other than earnings? Following through on the definition of “couple threshold” in Reg 62, I’m not convinced there is one in such a case.

I had a case some time ago which made me think that UC did in practice apply a couple threshold, which was simply equal to the individual threshold (as the partner in practice has zero expected hours). In the case I saw, the partner who fell within s.19 had earnings above the s/e claimant’s MIF level, and the MIF wasn’t applied at all. This made me think it was due to the existence of a couple threshold.

But I now realise that this could have simply been due to the bug in the system being talked about in this thread…