Which benefit should he claim?

FayeDownes

I’m a care provider for a young man, via  shared lives programme.  He is 23 and attends college.  Yesterday he didn’t receive his income support as they say they will only pay for full time education until he reaches 21. He has a mild to moderate learning disability.  He never received a letter or a phone call to let us know.  He can now claim either universal credit, job seekers or ESA.  No one seems to know the best benefit to claim.  Any ideas as all three is much lower in terms of pay from income support.
any help will be welcomed

steve51

Hi @FayeDownes

Good Evening it’s great to meet you today.

I am one of the Community Champion’s here at Scope.

We have got a “Benefit Calculater” here on our site.

This will give us a list of Benefits that maybe available for us to look at.

We can then go through each one to see what will be the best !!!!!

Please please let me know how you feel ????

@steve51

poppy123456

Hi,

All areas are now a full Universal Credit area so the only benefit that maybe possible to claim is this. Although i am a little confused why he was able to claim Income Support to begin with, students haven't been able to claim this for a very long time. Are you sure it was Income Support he was claiming and not ESA?

As he's over the age of 21 does he receive a student loan?

Does he receive DLA or PIP?

Adrian_Scope

Hi @FayeDownes and welcome to the community.

I've just been reading up a little more about Shared Lives, have you been involved with them long?
As for advising you, if you're able at all to answer Poppy's questions we'll be much positioned to support you!

mikehughescq

If he’s a Shared Lives case then the conversation about benefits needs to take place with the appropriate local authority, especially if they have an internal welfare rights team familiar with the scheme. In many cases the SL team takes full responsibility for sorting benefits e.g. http://sharedlivessw.org.uk/contact/funding-and-benefits-team/. I’m not sure this is appropriate for an Internet forum especially as you’ve posted under your own name which may make the young man in question identifiable.

Do not start a UC claim before checking in with the SL team as there’s generally no easy way out of UC and a better off calc may need to be done before any claim is made as the losses on UC can be significant.

@steve51 online benefit calculators are of no use in a situation like this and ought not to be recommended other than for situations where a person knows which means-tested benefit they need to claim and simply want to know how much it will be.