UC have taken too much money

* Edited for accuracy - Poppy has confirmed that this advice is not totally correct, I won't delete it due to risk of adding more confusion, but please read following posts. *

Ok, I think I see what's happened here now. IS is paid in advance, so the payment you got on 9th September covered the following two weeks run on. The payments on 23/9 and 6/10 were both overpayments as your UC covered that date range.

UC is basically the opposite, that's paid in arrears, meaning that it covers the previous month. That's what causes the large gap in payments during the migration, moving from advance payments on legacy benefits to arrears payments on UC.

IS & HB can't directly reclaim the money from you now that you're on UC. So that money gets reclaimed from the UC payments instead, at the same amount as the overlap of IS & HB. IS & HB send those figures to UC. So if you do want to question the figures, it is the IS phone line that you should call to ask them directly.

Hopefully that makes sense. I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm wrong there.

I still believe they should have allowed you smaller repayments for the HB at least, even if not the IS. I didn't get IS myself, but was on ESA (sort of equivalent benefits) and it was the overlapping ESA that was all reclaimed from my second UC payment without any choice. So that does seem to be the same for both of us, whether it's correct or not.

Do keep us updated on what the case manager says if they get back to you.

Income Support is paid in arrears and not in advance. Same for ESA.

Sorry, to add to the post above, the advice I gave can't be correct. I was on ESA for nearly a decade and always thought it was paid in advance for some reason!*

So that means the OP does only owe one of the IS payments after all? And they should call the IS phone line to question it with them directly?

(*This may explain why own overlap caused so much confusion with my own calculations. There's still a £700 discrepancy in my case!)

Thanks Poppy. Hopefully they can make some progress with this now. 🙂

It would be UC because they are the ones that took the overpayment.

I still disagree because that first payment should have been the 2 week run on. That run on should not affect your UC payment.

You were paid from IS as an error for the 2nd payment so yes it should have been a debt due to an overpayment so they should have allowed you to repay it in instalments.

In these cases further issues typically arise as Income Support, ESA and housing benefit are not always made aware that recovery has happened and thus send out overpayment letters, in addition to it being deducted in full from the initial UC award.

The 2 week run on payment is not included and should not be recovered from UC.

Any money received in addition to the 2 week run on (so some people have been receiving payments of ESA, IS and HB for 4-6 weeks instead of just the 2 week run on) and in these cases, the money is calculated as unearned income and deducted in full from UC.

The 2 week run on is not included and should not be deducted at all.