Hello Mike,
My client and her 17 year olds son have got a new tenancy in a new council area.
She was re-housed, incredibly quickly, by the local council’s homelessness service.
She had to leave her last home because of her partner’s abuse.
She gets Child Benefit, PIP at the high rate of both components, ESA at the Support Group rate with a Severe Disability Premium, Child Tax Credit, Housing Benefit, a single person Council Tax Discount and also Council Tax Reduction.
What I need to know is, can she stay on these benefits or does she have to claim Universal Credit?
Thanks
Mary
Hiya Mary
The simple answer to your question is that she must claim Universal Credit – but there’s lots of other stuff that I want to tell you about that might be useful to your client:
Natural Migration and Moving Home
Legacy Benefits is DWP jargon for the benefits for people under pension age that are being replaced by Universal Credit. These are Income Support, income-related ESA, income-based JSA, Working Tax Credit, Child Tax Credit and Housing Benefit.
Natural Migration is DWP jargon that means moving from the legacy benefits to Universal Credit if your circumstances change and you need to make a new claim.
If you are getting legacy benefits including Housing Benefit and you move directly to a new home in the same council area you can register a change of address for all your legacy benefits including Housing Benefit. Because you are not making any new claims you do not have to naturally migrate to Universal Credit.
But in your client’s case she’s moving to a new council area, and so she need to make a new claim for help with the new rent.
And because Housing Benefit is closed for new claims she must naturally migrate to Universal Credit.
Benefit Run-Ons and Benefit Advances
Universal Credit is calculated by assessment periods of one calendar month. You get your payment one week after the end of each assessment period.
If your client claims today, the 10th of June, she will be locked into a cycle of assessment periods that run from the 10th of each month to the 9th of the following month.
This means that if she claims today she will not get her first normal UC payment until 16th July.
There are two things to help her to manage this gap:
- Her ESA (or other DWP benefit) will run-on for the first two weeks after her Universal Credit claim. Unfortunately this doesn’t apply to the Child Tax Credit that she gets for her son
- She can apply for a benefit advance. This is a loan of an estimated amount of your first month’s payment, that is repaid by deductions from your benefit over the next 24 months.
The Transitional SDP Element
Because her old-school ESA includes a Severe Disability Premium her Universal Credit claim should include an extra element called a Transitional SDP Element.
For your client this starts off at £120 per month.
She gets it to soften the benefit cut that comes in moving from ESA to Universal Credit.
A New Work Capability Assessment?
Soon after claiming UC she will have to have a new-claim interview to agree a claimant commitment.
When people who have been getting ESA claim Universal Credit they are often told that they must start submitting sick-notes, that they will have to do a new UC50 form, and they will have to have a new Work Capability Assessment.
All of this is wrong.
Regulation 19 of the Transitional Provisions Regulations says that your old ESA assessment carries through to Universal Credit.
Usually, if you (gently) point this out to the the work-coach it sorts this potential problem out.
Because her ESA assessment put her in the Support Group, and this assessment carries through to the new claim, her Universal Credit should include a Limited Capability for Work Related Activity Element of £343.63 per month.
Paying for the Old Home
Because your client had to move quickly she may still have a notice period running on her former tenancy.
There is a special rule in Housing Benefit to allow her to continue her Housing Benefit claim for upto four weeks after the move to deal with this notice period.
For this rule, she will have to ask the old landlord to waive the rent for the notice period, but assuming that they say no, the Housing Benefit can continue.
Some Housing Benefit departments seem unaware of this rule – if you get stuck dealing with this, get in touch.
For the social-security-nerds, there are actually two rules in Regulation 7 of the Housing Benefit Regulations 2006. Paragraph 6(d) deals with two rent liabilities and paragraph 10 deals with a single rent liability.
Hopefully this tells you what you need to know, but get back to me if you need more
🙂
Mike