Carers allowance not sure they have calculated it correctly

boddy1

Hi,

Following on from my last message, I had some great helpful responses. I am having a terrible time with carers allowance. Can anyone help please?

I receive ESA support group, income related, PIP, CTC, HB, CB, CTS for me. Until last month when I applied for UC.

So I applied for child DLA for beginning of June 2024. I got the child DLA award notice 13th of December 2024. I applied for carers around 6th of feb 2025. On the carers allowance website it says the following:

When do you want Carer's Allowance to start?

The person you care for must get their disability benefit before your claim can start.

You can backdate your claim for up to 3 months, as long as you provided care for at least 35 hours a week.

Claims that can be backdated for more than 3 months

If the person you care for was awarded their disability benefit in the last 3 months with a backdated start date of more than 3 months ago, you can claim from:

• their disability benefit start date – if you were providing care for at least 35 hours a week from that date
• the date you started to provide care – if this was after their benefit start date

Your claim date cannot be more than 3 months in the future

I have now received a letter from Carers allowance and they denied a backdate but they say I was not entitled to claim Carers yet because I had a claim for ESA. I have now applied for UC under managed migration and they wont start carers until I get my first UC payment.

I don't get any of this.

Am I right in thinking that I should have been getting a backdate from carers allowance to June 2024?

Am I right in thinking that they have made a mistake regarding ESA?, because I thought it was only news style esa that were overlapping benefits but the type I was on you can still claim both.

Am I right in thinking that they should have reduced my ESA and topped up with carers element, not denied it?

Any help much appreciated because I just don't know what to do next. I have also received a really confusing letter from ESA.

Albus_Scope

Hey @boddy1 and welcome to the community.

Wow, that sounds like a complicated situation. There appears to be a lot of moving parts here and unfortunately it's not an answer I can give. I'm hoping someone will be able to answer your query soon though. If not, it may be worth speaking to a Citizens Advice advisor?