Ongoing issues with getting cost of living payments disregarded from capital declarations.
Ive gone all the way to tribunal with this once already. The judge made recommendations and sent it back to DWP to recalculate. Then DWP refunded me nearly 1K of underpaid benefit.
I had complained as well because my journal entries were being ignored and being given incorrect advice to deduct COls from account balances. I was given a £150 compensation payment and told not to deduct the COLs from my balances in future, but to declare the actual balances and put a note in my journal about the other disregards (COL and Income).
Ive been doing this for three months now. To date my COLs and Income have not been disregarded properly.
Im approaching the 16K boundary and Im scared Im going to be kicked off UC unless someone starts disregarding the COLs properly soon.
I dont know what to do I put in a complaint in my journal and through the Complaints form on the DWP site last month but I have heard nothing back except the guy who respnds to my journal posts (no work coach as Im LCWRA) is saying he would have to get advice and asking for three months of bank statements (he has done this each month since the tribunal decision- it never happened prior to this).
I would like a different person managing my journal as this guy doesnt seem to understand the amount of stress he is causing me- well at least I hope he doesnt.
As I say Im out of ideas… previous experience suggests they may well continue to ignore me. Do I have to go back to my MP? Why do they do this??
Comments
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Hi,
I don't have any advice to add but am very interested in this thread.
I have to update my savings regularly due to frequent changes. Initially I declared the full amount and asked UC to deduct the COLs though the journal. But they didn't bother and didn't reply to my journal messages so I've just been deducting them myself ever since.
Interested to hear that DWP have told you not to do that…but in my experience the journal staff won't or can't do it the way the DWP are suggesting either. So we are stuck between a rock and a hard place?
Please do let us know if you ever find a suitable solution. For now I will continue to deduct mine until I am told otherwise.
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Hi @Slonvinton. It sounds like a very stressful process for you, and according to their own guidelines, COL payments do not affect your benefits, so I'm unsure why this hasn't been the case for you.
As you've already been to tribunal with this, the next step you could take is the Ombudsman. They have a complaint checker so you can quickly see if they can help you.
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Yes this is familiar to me- I went through the same process as you- declare full amount, I was then told to deduct and now Im being told to declare full amount again. Its crazy they dont know what they are doing LOL
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The thing with the tribunal is it only covers the time period you go to the tribunal about… so if they make the same mistake again its another tribunal.
How do I go to the Ombudsman (Im in Scotland)?0 -
The main problem we have is that the UC system doesn't have a box for COL payments on the 'Disregards' page.
It has boxes for things like benefits backpay and insurance pay-outs.
In my opinion they should add another box for COL payments. Or at least a box for 'other' which would immediately trigger an action requirement by the DWP staff. Unlike journal messages which just seem to disappear once we no longer have a Work Coach.
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EXACTLY, this was part of my complaint last time and both the decision maker on that and the DWP complaint staff have recommended it as a solution, but nothing has happened yet.
Honestly I dont think its going to happen, maybe they dont want to tip people off about the COLs if they dont already know they can be disregarded. There is very little other explanation given the chaos and stress it causes.
I do wonder if the fact we have no work coach is an issue and if it is thats "indirect diuscrimination" surely1 -
@Slonvinton, use the following link which is the 'online complaint form' which asks you questions about your complaint and assesses whether they will be able to help you. It covers the UK.
I haven't come across issues with Cost of Living payments before so I'm just learning about it. It seems like there could be simple changes made which would make things easier, but these kind of things often don't get done!
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The lack of Work Coach is one reason that our journal messages don't get read. But we have to be a bit careful what we wish for here. We don't want actual Work Coaches forced upon people with LCWRA. What we need in some sort of 'admin' person who would read every message and then either action a simple task themself, or forward the message on to the correct department for more complex tasks. That would have to be a new job role at the DWP as I don't believe it currently exists. The main job of a Work Coach is to help people get into work, so it would be a waste of their time (and pay rate) to be dealing with this sort of thing.
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True.
I was told (in the response to my previous complaint) to mark the journal comment about my UC capital declaration "for the attention of the capital decision maker", but there is no decision maker box on the journal comment choice (unlike work coach) so Ive been choosing the payment box… I dont know if this is right (maybe Im just supposed to write that at the top of my comment- its unclear).
Not that I imagine it makes much difference they ignore COMPLAINT written atthe start of a journal post. I did a Subject Access Request that showed their side of the journal and it was just a string of "no response required" to everything including posts about the cost of living payment issues. ChatGBT told me they actually arent required to respond to journal posts (though obviously make of that what you will given the source- but its probably worth digging into because it isnt always hallucinating).
I pretty much knew it wasnt going to work the way they said when I read the response to the complaint. My main worry at present is getting kicked off UC for being over 16K (though Im not if its worked out correctly), before I can get this sorted out.1 -
Yes, I can understand that. I was getting closer and closer to £16k myself earlier this year, which is the reason I kept deducting mine. I wouldn't have bothered if my income and outgoings were evenly matched.
If you do pass £16k before this gets sorted then I would have to recommend that you deduct the COL's before putting the amounts in for that month. From what I've seen so far, the £16k cut-off seems to be done automatically by the computer system rather than a human. So I would not risk declaring over £16k on the system myself.
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Thats very helpful to know. Thank you
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