Reporting capital

J2k88

Hello everyone

We are currently in the middle of a review and we've never updated our savings, obviously this was a big mistake, my question now is do we report our current savings? I'm confused though because I receive pip, my daughter receives dla, she had a back payment last march which was nearly 2k, we've also had col payments of 900 pounds, can we subtract this from the figure we declare? This is my first post here so please bare with me 😂 any help would be gratefully received though, thank you

OverlyAnxious

Hi,

If you have an online journal you can report the savings through there under the 'make a change' section.

If you and your daughter share a bank account and are both on UC then that is going to make declaring savings more difficult. I don't really have any advice for working out how much each of you has if that is the case.

For the DLA backpay, there is now a specific section for that when declaring savings online. So you put your full bank account total on the first page. Then put the backpay on the 'disregards' page, in the box for benefit backpay. The disregard for that will end 12 months after it was paid, so March 2026 in this case.

COL payments are more difficult. Legally they are deductible, but there is no section for this on the online form. UC staff generally tell people to declare the full account amount, and then send them a journal message afterwards for the UC staff to disregard the COL payment manually. In my experience, they don't actually do that. In fact I never had confirmation that they even read the message, so I have been deducting mine before declaring savings ever since, but that isn't really the correct way to do it.

If you have well under £6000 total then it doesn't really matter about the COL payments, because you won't get any savings deduction anyway. It is only for people over £6000 who will lose money by not deducting correctly.

J2k88

https://forum.scope.org.uk/discussion/comment/1092873#Comment_1092873

Thank you for that

Do you know if pip and dla are treated the same in regards to when the become capital? So should I subtract December's payments of these benefits when declaring capital on 31st that's when our AP ends, I find all this so confusing, obviously anxious about the current review as well. Thank you

OverlyAnxious

https://forum.scope.org.uk/discussion/comment/1092875#Comment_1092875

This is where it gets more complicated unfortunately. UC reviewers don't appear to be deducting any benefit income.

Technically you should be able to deduct unspent benefit income during the current payment period. (Not the total payment, as you will have spent some since receiving it). However, it's a very complicated calculation trying to work out how much you've already spent from it, especially with multiple payment dates for different benefits each month.

Based on the most recent information we have, I would have to recommend not deducting any benefit income from your savings declaration, because that is the way the UC review staff seem to be doing it.