21/06/20 to 27/06/20

Work during this period included new hb/ctr claims for persons in temporary supported accommodation. Also a new claim for a pensioner whose husband has recently passed away. They had been getting Guaranteed Pension Credit and he was the claimant for their hb/ctr claim. The widow has now submitted a claim form as we had asked her to do but her capital is above £16k. She needs to be in receipt of Guaranteed Pension Credit before we can award nay hb/ctr. Two VEP tasks this week, i.e alerts from HMRC informing of changes in wage. Both cases were very similar. We were using an average of December/January wages but they both then had fluctuating wages in Feb/Mar/Apr/May and now their June wage was back to the average wage we had calculated months back. I decided that the average wage for the first one was unchanged. The second one had returned to the wage level she had in Dec/Jan. Her wages had been lower in Feb/Mar but we were not notified at the time so I am unable to alter the wage record on our system.

More Covid-19 self-employed review forms are being returned. One claimant has not received any SEISS grant. She has provided proof of her self-employed income in 2019/20 so I have updated our records with this new information. For this claimant the impact of Covid-19 will be reflected in her 2020/21 self-employed income.

This week I have noticed that there can be a considerable delay in a person's UC claim being terminated after they start to claim their state pension. I had a case where state pension was awarded from 04/05/20 but UC continued in payment to 19/06/20. The customer had correctly applied for hb at the start of May but I was unable to process their claim until this week. Their hb entitlement commenced on 20/06/20 obviously because housing costs were paid by UC up to an including 19/6/20.

Another thing learned is that whereas previously we wrote out whenever a dependant reached the age of 18, there is no point in doing this now when a claimant is in receipt of UC as we are simply using the details we receive each month of the customer's UC award. Therefore if the child element still includes the 18 year old  then they are still a dependant. If it no longer includes the 18 year old then they have ceased to be a dependant & presumably child benefit has ended for them and we write out at this point.

Comments

  1. Sandeep28 June 2020 at 08:48

    Your last paragraph raises an interesting point and one that most LA's are following. It is not necessary correct but the most fluent way of working as both claims should match in their treatment of the dep status and this is the easiest way of doing so.

    ReplyDelete

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