Hi, I am an appointee for my adult child who has learning difficulties/autism. He received DLA then this changed to PIP. We started claiming UC which then changed to the LCWRA element. We received a review request and whilst providing the required documents, I was researching what else we may encounter with this and came across the ruling about savings. I had no idea there was a savings threshold for UC and feel awful that I’ve missed this. The savings were not over the threshold when the claim was first made, but we were completely unaware that you couldn’t save your payments. We have been subsiding our child, thinking this was the right thing to do so that he could save for his future when we are no longer around. We also added savings to his account, that we had saved as he was growing up, to put towards a car. This has resulted in being over the £6K threshold for 9 months and when we added to the savings it exceeded the £16K threshold for around 6 months. We then purchased a car in September, which took it back under the £16K threshold. We’ve now had the initial review call and I’ve explained all this to them and how I was unaware of not being able to save your payments. I said I completely understand we need to pay back the overpayments and would like to get this done as soon as possible, I’d estimate it’ll be about £6,000 to pay back, but they said it now needs to go to a specialist team and won’t be sorted quickly. I’m so worried about it and just want to get it resolved as soon as possible. Do you have any advice of how long it may take for this to be resolved. I’ve read that they can prosecute if you fail to provide changes, but we genuinely didn’t know we were doing anything wrong. Have you any experience of what happens about this?
Sorry for the long post.
