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Change to guidance on SSWP v AT—- DWP now accept it applies to third country nationals

Martin Williams
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Welfare rights advisor - CPAG, London

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Total Posts: 809

Joined: 16 June 2010

Hi all,

Yesterday the DWP updated Advice for Decision Making Memo ADM 06/24.

Rather annoyingly they have simply replaced the existing document on gov.uk with a new one and it isn’t possible to see from that the change they made.

However, we do try to save them when published so we can note these sort of changes.

The substantive change is that the DWP now accept that SSWP v AT applies also to the non EU family members of EU nationals who have PSS (including those who only join the EU national after 31/12/2020 provided the family relationship existed as at that date).

I have attached the new and old memos plus a comparison in case that helps.

It means I now need to update the CPAG webpage but that will take me a couple of days to sort out as I have other stuff on. We did have a template submission for third country nationals to use on there- hopefully that no longer needed given the change in DWP position.

Note as well that any third country national wrongly refused benefit since SSWP v AT  should be able to use official error revision (the change in guidance was not forced by them losing a testcase so it is an admission that DWP officer following the older version of guidance to disentitled a third country national erred in law in a way which counts as an official error.

Martin

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RachelUCN
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Housing Systems

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Total Posts: 32

Joined: 10 May 2023

Hi Martin

Thanks for the update!

Just for info - if you ever don’t manage to save something before it’s changed or it’s a webpage, you can try this site that archives webpages - https://web.archive.org/

You just put in the url and it’ll (hopefully) show you versions archived on different dates going back in time. As the ADM memo is a PDF, that itself isn’t archived but I just tried doing the general ADM page and clicking on the link and that seems to show the old PDF (ie it says all non-EU Nationals are excluded).

It’s come in handy before when I know a gov.uk page has been updated but I’m not sure what’s changed.

Martin Williams
forum member

Welfare rights advisor - CPAG, London

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Total Posts: 809

Joined: 16 June 2010

Thanks Rachel - we’d tried the wayback machine but not managed to find old memo- you are right it definitely there in the snapshot from 18/01/2025.

I have updated our website now as well.