Terms & Conditions

[Anonymous]

Am I right in thinking that any case where partner/claimant is over 60
that the income rules in SI 2003/325 apply, whether they are in receipt
of pension credit or not.

So for example
lone parent of 61
receives

SRP £70 (that includes dependant child increase of £3)
Private Pension £40
maintenance for the child from childs other parent of £25.

We would only take income of £107, as we would not be able to take into
account the child dependancy increase or the maintenance?

[Mark]

Yes – that’s the way I see it.

As an aside – are you sure that child dependancy increases in SRP still exist? I thought that they were done away with from April 2003 when the New Tax Credits came in. I did check this out a few weeks ago and convinced myself that the SSCBA was amended from April 2003 to remove the possibility of child dependancy increases in SRP and Incap.

[Julian Hobson]

Have raised this with DWP it looks as though the provisions in the SPC regs themselves have been copied into the HB regs with the addition of CTC and Earnings as income and the exclusion of the disregards for CHB, adoption, fostering etc.

As a result of excluding the disregards, they appear to have failed to specifically include them, the effect of this is that all those things fail to be counted as income for HB purposes. Oh Joy.

[Mark]

Julian – I’m not sure I completely agree with you on this one. Fostering payments are already disregarded in the current (now working age) regs under Sch 5 para 24. So their absence from the list in the new HB reg (for pensioners) 25(1) makes sense to me. Adoption payments are a different matter and it does indeed seem as though no comparable provision to the existing Sch 5 para 23(1) is in the new pensioner regs. I’m not sure what the policy intention was though so I’m not entirely convinced that this is an oversight.

As far as Child Benefit goes I don’t agree there either. Child Benefit is income for pensioners by virtue of new HB reg 25(1)(h).

[Julian Hobson]

Well spotted, I accept CHB included by virtue of the fact it is not excluded under HB reg 25(1)(h), and that fostering is disregarded under working age so no change.

I think maintenance and adoption allowances are still an issue. Hopefully it isn’t an oversight but let’s assume at this stage that it is.

My real concern now is that the way in which the Pensioner regs work, and the way in which the Working age regs work are completely different. The approach is different and my difficulty appears to be understanding that the old “include everything, unless the schedules exclude it”, is replaced with “only include those items specified” and “be carefull because parts of the Include regs actually apply to specific exclusions”.

In practice the new approach is probably simpler but, I would say, less clear.

[Mark]

Can I just go back to the earlier part of this thread in relation to Child Dependancy increases.

I had suggested that these were abolished when the New Tax Credits came in – but I now want to revise that view.

Child Dependancy Increases were indeed abolished by Section 1(3)(e) of The Tax Credits Act 2002. However, the commencement order that dictates the effective date of abolition can be found in SI2003/938. This shows that the abolition date for the increases was 6th April 2003. However, at Reg 3 of those same regulations it is clear that transitional provisions exist for anyone who was already getting the child dependency increase before the abolition.

The net effect of this is that for some pensioners the child dependancy increases do still exist and in the assessment of HB/CTB these specific amounts will need to be disregarded in any income calculation as per new HB reg 25(1)(h)(vii).

[Julian Hobson]

So 06/10/03 arrives no PC application yet but the new HB rules apply because >60 currently have gross SRP on system need to net it down, take off any maintenance received, in other words only include CHB and CTC. I don’t know if we have any affected customers but someone must ? Are we all going to check ?

[Mark]

Just did! We have 36 non MIG cases where pensioners have children and therefore potentially child dependancy increases too.

[Author]

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