Savings over £6000 awaiting outcome

That is saying if you had an active deduction from your IR ESA to pay something like direct rent or your water bill, you'd need to contact the third party such as a utility company or landlord. As the deduction would stop with the end of your IR ESA.

This doesn't apply to you unless you had an active deduction from your IR ESA.

The historical overpayment calculation is a separate matter.

No P60's are to keep for your records, they will be sent out to you once a year after the end of the financial year which is April.

I didn't receive any response at all. Only know they got the bank statements because I sent them by tracked post.

Yes, I have been on UC for almost a year now. My savings review must have been triggered by moving to UC. Because I put a different savings amount on the UC form than I did on the ESA form 7 years earlier.

The discrepancy is with ESA. UC won't know anything about it, so there's no point putting anything on the UC journal.

I have also had a separate issue with the DWP debt team. My migration took so long that I ended up overpaid ESA & HB while migrating. Got letters saying I had to pay back over £2000. The debt team were not helpful, they can't be contacted through the journal, and I couldn't get a breakdown of the figures from anyone either. I just paid it all in the end. Then a few weeks later they refunded about £700 to me…saying that I'd overpaid the repayments! So I never did get the bottom of it. I assume that's sorted now. But the ESA savings overpayment will be totally separate.

Correct, this has nothing to do with UC at all.

The JobCentre is basically just the 'face' of benefits now. Manual bank statement and overpayment checks are done behind the scenes at a national DWP centre somewhere. It is ESA who will be dealing with it, but until they get round to looking at your paperwork and entering that on the computer, the ESA call handlers won't know anything about it either.

I understand it's a stressful wait but there really isn't anything you can do at this point. The bank statements will just be sat in a pile in a DWP centre waiting for someone to go through them. There won't be any further updates until that has been done.

No problem. I'm glad to hear you finally got through to ESA on the phone.

Your current NS ESA and UC should not be stopped by a past overpayment because you do meet the criteria for those now.

If they are aware of how bad your health was when you went over £16k then I hope they will show some compassion and allow the claim to remain open during that time, even if they consider the whole income-based ESA payment to have been overpaid at that point and reclaim the lot.

Because it was partly income based and partly contributions based, it is only the income based part that could have been overpaid, which most people find is quite a small percentage of each payment.

Housing Benefit is completely separate. That's managed by your local council, not the DWP. ESA won't calculate or claim repayments on their behalf. You should inform the council of the savings separately. HB rules vary across the country so it's difficult to advise on that. If you received council tax reduction, that is also affected by savings. Again, that varies across the country. My own CTR stopped at £10k in savings but others can be £16k or £6k, and some have graded deductions over £6k like UC does. HB & CTR are both managed by your local council so it it them that you should inform of the excess savings if not done already. They will also need to see all the bank statements, so if you can get those back from ESA once they've finished their review then that saves getting all of the same statements again.

It's very difficult to estimate the amount of overpayment during the £16k years as I don't know how much of your ESA was income based. But for a rough estimate, the ESA deductions should have been £1 per week for every £250 over £6000 you have. So just using that it works out as:

2020 - £416

2021 - £416

2022 - £1872

2023 - £2080

2024 - £2080

Total: £6864

It could be more than that if they decide that all of the income based ESA was overpaid during the £16k years. That is just a rough estimate based on the standard savings deduction between £6k-£16k.