Repaying Overpayment.

lze

I am appointee for my daughter.She has been overpaid £9000 backdated to 2022 as she had £21000 in her account which they were informed about as this was a payment from her former employers the NHS..They have now stopped her UC payments completely in february after a review.She has £4900 left in her bank account. UC will not respond to my query as to what arrangements can be made to repay overpayment or even when partial payments would restart.Any advice appreciated.

lze

OverlyAnxious

Hi,

When a UC award is ended because of savings above £16,000 the claim gets closed completely. Partial payments will not restart. She will need to make a new claim for UC, when her savings are below £16,000.

What type of payment was the £21,000? Some payments are disregarded for 12 months. Did she still have more than £16,000 after the 12 months? Or are they saying this payment was non-deductible from the start?

If you believe they have made an error, and that they should not have closed the account, then you should keep contacting them regarding the old account and make a Mandatory Reconsideration on the account closure.

If you believe the account was closed correctly, due to excess savings, then you should open a new account as above. Currently there is no mechanism to reopen an account that correctly closes due to excess savings. (Accounts can be reopened after excess earning closure, so I am hoping they will do the same for savings at some point).

lze

They have not told me the claim is closed.She went over £16000 when she was paid off from NHS due to illness.. £21,000 was an accumilation of Tax Rebate £3472.49,Annual Leave payment of £10413.25 and Covid payment of £491.74.I informed them of these payments at the time.2021,2022 and 2023.She now has £5000 in her account.If i was to pay for her the £9000 repayment would they restart her payments do you think.

OverlyAnxious

https://forum.scope.org.uk/discussion/comment/1027025#Comment_1027025

Could you post a screenshot of the latest UC journal entries and/or the latest UC statement please? (Cover any personal info). The claim should be closed if she went over £16,000 in savings so I'm not sure exactly what's happened in this case.

The largest amount there is the annual leave payment in lieu. That should initially have been counted as earnings, which would have stopped the UC payment for at least the month it was received, but kept the claim open at that point. It should then have been counted as savings after that. If the total savings went over £16,000 at that point, then the claim should have been automatically closed.

Tax rebates also work in the same way, initially counted as earnings, and then savings if they're not used. These are not disregarded for savings purposes. I am not sure what the covid payment is, perhaps something specific to NHS workers, but again that is unlikely to be disregarded either. The Cost of Living payments for people on low incomes can be disregarded indefinitely if she received those. Benefits backpayments can also be disregarded for 12 months in most cases, or indefinitely if over £5000 if she received any of those.

If the claim is still open, and only being blocked by an outstanding repayment, then paying off the debt could allow the payments to restart again. But I just don't have enough information on this particular case to recommend doing that.

lze

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I phoned them again this morning and the same response."A case manager will telephone me within two days."For the sake of my daughter i need to know if i personally pay the repayment will they restart her UC payments.

OverlyAnxious

Thank you for uploading those.

I am sorry to see that this has been going on for so many months now. That's really not acceptable.

As there are no recent statements showing at all, and no journal messages about a payment block, I do not believe that simply repaying the £9k will restart her payments.

I assume that letter has been manually written by a person, because the line "your money, savings & investments was more than what you told us" is very poor English. I do not understand why they are only requesting £9000 if there was an overpayment of £26,000. I would recommend that you do not pay the money until you are contacted to explain exactly how they've come to that figure and what has happened to the rest of the overpayment.

Would you be able to go to the Job Centre yourself? If they still don't call you today or provide anything useful through the journal then you may need a 'heavier' approach. Completely understand if you're not able to do that, I wouldn't be able to myself, but it is incredibly frustrating that we get pushed around and fobbed off through the journal as there aren't any consequences at all to the UC staff from doing it. If you can arrive in person and stay there until you get an answer then that should have some more impact.

You can also try contacting the DWP debt management team on the phone though they only deal with the debt, they won't be able to reinstate the UC payments.