Well, one way or another, you should not be recovering that £60.
While the assessor’s logic was flawed, so was the QA feedback received. The claimant did not need to report the ‘change’ because there was not one! £60 across 4 months? That equates to less than one hour (c. 1/2 hour?) per week across the period. (Very importantly, the decision should also not have gone back if the latest average was higher and so reduced HB.)
If the difference was a little greater, you could determine that, while you disagreed with the assessor, their original decision was not wrong. The problem is that the justification for going back is actually the reason it should not. (The idea of using a fair average – as set out in HBR29 – is that, at some future point when the wages hopefully creep back up, those higher earnings will only get used moving forward too.)
I think I would just live with this one being LA error non-recoverable.
