Terms & Conditions

[Anonymous]

Your opinions would be appreciated on the following:

A full time lone parent student has a child care package awarded to her as part of her student loan.

As per Regulations we disregard the child care package from her income received from her student loan.

She also works 16 hours per week and we include this income in her claim.

Should we allow child care cost disregard against her 16 hours per week employment as per the Regulations for disregards from income?

[Mark]

Yes.

[Anonymous]

Won’t we be disregarding the child care costs twice?

[Carol Meredith]

As I understand it yes we do allow child care disregard against 16 hour employment. From experience of a similar claim your student should also get child care element of working tax credit and if she has not claimed this should be advised to.
Also note the disregard due to student income is an amount that actually probably bears no resemblance to actual child care costs while the disregard due to working will be based on the actual child care costs.
The lady I dealt with ended up with too much income to get HB but was not too upset about this. Her only problem was that she would lose far too much financially by reducing hours to below 16 while she took her exams that she felt obliged to carry on working.

[Author]

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