CTR backdate

I have a client who was entitled to no Council tax support as he was 2 quid over the GPC threshold and had over 16K in savings.

I managed to make a successful AA claim for his wife, and his new carers premium has been backdated to December 2013

He now gets GPC, backdated to december 2013.

He made a claim for full council tax support as he now gets GPC, however the local authority insist that they have special “pensioner provision” which means they can only backdate 3 months.

Does this sound right? I cant find anything out about such a thing.

Does each LA have its own criteria or is it worth pursuing. I cant believe the pension service did a 10 month backdate but the LA wont?

Im not sure how CTR works compared to standard benefit rules with regard to backdating.

Any help will be appreciated

I think pensioners are covered by the Council Tax Reductions Schemes (Default Scheme) (England) Regulations 2012 (http://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2012/2886/contents/made).

If you look at reg 110 para 1 it says -

Date on which an application is made

110.  (1)  Subject to sub-paragraph (7), the date on which an application is made is—

(a)in a case where—

(i)an award of state pension credit which comprises a guarantee credit has been made to the applicant or his partner, and

(ii)the application is made within one month of the date on which the claim for that state pension credit which comprises a guarantee credit was received at the appropriate DWP office,

the first day of entitlement to state pension credit which comprises a guarantee credit arising from that claim;

to my reading that means that if the CTR application was made within a month of the PC application (or notification of change of circs that led to award of GC) the start of the CTR claim is the same as the start of the PCGC award

Daphne’s answer is most useful to you. However, the rules on backdating for people who’ve met Pension Credit age are different, namely 3 months for any reason, as opposed to working age people, which is 6 months with good cause. CPAG pp.128-9.

I wondered whether the Council had in mind here the anti-piggyback rule in paragraph 6(3) of Schedule 8 to the CTR Prescribed Requirements Regs for England (if the authority is in England that is).

Para 6 provides generally that CTR is automatically backdated up to three months before the date of the application.  But para 5 (the equivalent of the default provisions that Daphne referred to above) fixes the date of application as the date of SPC entitlement where the CTR app was made within a month of the SPC claim.  Since SPC itself can be automatically backdated forup to three months, these two provisions in tandem would have the effect of backdating CTR for a further three months before the date of SPC entitlement: the CTR backdate would “piggyback” on the SPC backdate.  But para 6(3) prevents this - the CTR three months’ automatic backdate cannot extend more than three months before the date of the SPC claim where the CTR app is linked to the SPC claim - the backdate periods are in effect concurrent.

Now in the OP’s case that wouldn’t be a problem - the claimant is not asking for CTR to be backdated to earlier than the GC start date.

However, I think the difficulty is that there has been no recent claim for SPC: the claimant was getting Savings Credit and DWP has made a superseding decision awarding GC from the date of the Carer Premium kicking in.  This means the CTR application is not linked to any SPC claim - it’s a simple case of CTR being backdated three months.

The claimant could ask for a discretionary CT reduction so as to reduce his liability to zero from the date of GC entitlement, but if he has capital over £16,000 I would expect the Council to refuse that.