Carers allowance : please help!

Hi folks.

Long winded story so bear with me please!

I have a client with extreme social phobia, which also includes agoraphobia.
She is totally socially excluded due to this, and has never had a bank account before and hasnt a clue how to work ATM cash machines, mobile phones or anything else.
As a result of this she is one of the few people i know who until recently still received Girocheques.

She used to get Income support due to incapacity, Carers allowance for looking after her elderly mother who she lives with, and her mother also got giros for her pension credit and attendance allowance.

As her mother has poor mobility it was always up to the client to cash all of their Giros whenever she felt able to leave the house. She tends to be able to leave the house maybe once every 2-3 months to do this. This has left her on occasion with a big pile of uncashed giros, which she would return to the pension service, carers unit or Jobcentre plus for replacement as they expire after 90 days or so.

She had a big pile of uncashed Carers allowance giros which were returned to them for replacement in the summer. Somebody at the carers unit noticed that the payments werent being cashed and wrote to the client asking why. As this has been a regular occurrence the client explained the situation, however she did not record the time of the call or who she spoke to, as it was never problematic in the past.
They did tell her in August that enough was enough and that from now on she would have to open a bank account and that they would send no more Giros. I helped this client open a post office account for all benefits and arranged for all backdated income support, new ESA payments, AA and PC to go into her account. I was also told in August by Carers that once the PO account opened they would pay and backdate all returned Giros and outstanding monies into her account.

The client rang me to say that although other benefits are OK she has no CA in payment. She rang CA to be told they had closed her claim in May and would have to make a new claim without backdate. This is not what she or I was promised.

I am going to write to Preston, however as she met the criteria for CA from may until now (and they closed her CA claim without good cause in my opinion) can i legally request a new claim with a full backdate, or can i insist the old claim stands and must be reopened?. If so are there any regs i can use?

This is obviously a procedural issue so any advice would be greatly appreciated, as always

They cannot simply ‘close her claim’, as a matter of law, as it ceases to subsist under s8(2) of the SAA 1998.  They can only revise or supersede the awarding decision under s3 or s10 and therefore must make out the appropriate ground.  What the DWP can do, however, is extinguish the right to payment of a sum of benefit under reg 38 of the Claims and Payments Regs if after receiving such a sum the claimant hasn’t cashed it within twelve months.  This is subject to a request not to under “good cause”.  The two mechanisms are not the same thing and, as Tony says, the decision to end entitlement should be appealed asap.

Thanks fellas. I will appeal, but recommend she opens a new claim in the meantime to kick start her claim into payment. Cant take it for granted she will win these days.