Paul Burns Kirklees

22/05/20 to 30/05/20 Monday 25th May was a Bank Holiday. The work this week has been mainly new ctr claims again created via new claims for UC as has been the case for the last few weeks. Plus some routine work involving household members reaching the age of 18. One of these was unable to obtain a letter from college confirming her son's enrolment and attendance. I asked for a recent bank statement showing child benefit payments as proof instead. A claimant with nil income came up for review. We have paid hb/ctr based on nil income ever since her ESA ended in September 2017. In the past she has provided a signed statement from a friend who states he gives our claimant £50 per week from his own money for  her to live on.  I noticed this time that the friend is himself on benefit and has his own hb/ctr claim. I've written to ask if the arrangement is ongoing. I wondered if I should be asking why this gentleman was giving £50 per week and how he could afford to do this. I ...

15/05/20 to 21/05/20 This week almost exclusively involved registering new claims for CTR received via a claim for UC and then assessing CTR claims received last month where the UC award info is now available. Again there are some who don't qualify but might when we get their 2nd monthly UC award breakdown. Nothing new learned. Another joint tenant claim cropped up that again had been processed incorrectly. A son had moved in with his elderly mother in a council property in 2016. He was made a joint tenant in October 2019 so that he would be able to succeed the tenancy when mum passed away. The original rent account was ended and a new one created in joint names. we should have assessed mum on 50% liability from that point and invited the son to claim hb for the other half. Instead we added him to mum's claim as a non-dep. She received attendance allowance so there was no non-dep deduction. She has now passed away so I have invited the son to claim hb for the full 100% ren...

09/05/20 to 14/05/20 This week almost exclusively involved registering new claims for CTR received via a claim for UC and then assessing CTR claims received last month where the UC award info is now available. Again there are some who don't qualify but might when we get their 2nd monthly UC award breakdown. The claim I wrote about in the Blog dated 24/04/20 cropped up again. One of the joint tenants had realised or been told that the 'bedroom tax' had been incorrectly imposed on the HB claim. They had discussed the matter with a Housing Officer at Kirklees Neighbourhood Housing who emailed me asking me to look into it. I replied back to advise that I had tried to be pragmatic and act in the best interests of the customer by ensuring the claim was correct going forward. This is because the CTR part had also been incorrectly processed and the other tenant who was 1/3 liable for council tax had had CTR awarded based on 50% liability. When we corrected this in September 20...

03/05/20 to 08/05/20 As in the previous week we are still receiving a lot of new ctr claims via claims for UC made by people affected by the Covid-19 pandemic.

26/04/20 to 02/05/20 We have received many new claims for ctr via new claims for UC as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. We have started to receive UC award details for those people who applied a month ago. Assessed ctr entitlement for these & they were a mixture of qualifiers and a lot of non-qualifiers as their UC assessed income figure is based on their wage in the month before the pandemic. We agreed between us that due to the volumes of incoming work it was now all hands to the pumps and apprenticeship work should be suspended for the time being. This week was originally supposed to be the block learning week at Kirklees College which has now been postponed.