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new style esa and carers allowance

hi I have been receiving carers allowance for my disabled daughter for a number of years, we are now in receipt of universal credit, and I have been awarded new style esa support group, so the carers allowance is being deducted from the universal credit, but now im not getting the carers premium either, I rang uc and was told this is because im not allowed to be a carer, so would I be better discontinuing my claim for carers allowance? also I applied for pip and was turned down by tribunal because I receive carers allowance, or so I was told by my advisor. its just we rely on the carers allowance weekly at the moment.
Replies
wance
In Universal Credit, you can't get the limited capability for work-related activity (support group) element for the same person as the carer element - so although you obviously are a carer, you can't get the carer element in UC, because you get the higher support group element (called LCWRA element in UC).
You're right about the carer's allowance (CA) - it just comes off your UC. It's up to you whether you give up the CA. At the moment it doesn't make any difference to your income because it comes right back off your UC, so if you give it up, you won't be any better off, but you won't be any worse off either.
Tribunals can be suspicious of disabled people who claim CA. It depends of course on what you are claiming PIP for, and what you have to do to provide care for your daughter. Case law makes it clear that a tribunal should look carefully at these facts and not just assume that because you get CA you can't also meet the descriptors to get enough points for an award of PIP daily living and/or mobility component.
If the tribunal relied on your caring responsibilities as evidence that you didn't have problems with the PIP activities and so couldn't score enough points, then it should have investigated to find out the nature of the tasks undertaken when you are caring and explain why they are relevant to PIP activities too. If they didn't do that, it could be an error of law. If you had an adviser, you might want to check with them (although depending when this all happened, it may be too late to do anything about the tribunal decision now - worth asking though).
Now you are on UC, you might decide that as giving up CA won't change your money, you could do that and make a new claim for PIP for yourself? Of course it will take some time to get a decision on that but it may be that you'll have a better chance of getting it if you don't say that you are also caring for your daughter - like I say it depends on the interaction between what you do for her and the points you think you should get in the PIP activities.
The only thing to watch out for is if you live in Scotland. If you live in Scotland, then I would be very careful before giving up carer's allowance. That's because in Scotland, you get an extra amount, called the carer's allowance supplement and worth £442 a year at the moment. That does NOT get deducted from UC so can be worth receiving. You still don't get the carer element though.
I hope that gives you a bit more information. You don't have to worry about your national insurance credits if you give up carer's allowance, by the way. You'll still get those anyway because of the other benefits you are on.
Will
Before esa he was on incapacity benefit, and the dwp have recently been changing our amounts of payment(esa) so we rang them up so as not to owe them anything, as we have been getting slightly more money and we didn't know why, we were told our case is complex, leading us to believe we may be included in the IB repayment situation, so now my husband has received an assessment form for his esa and we can't understand what has prompted this as we haven't got a change of circumstances we are exactly the same, so why would he need another assessment as if its a change of circumstances. Advice gratefully received. L