Terms & Conditions

[Anonymous]

Hello, I’ve got a query which I haven’t come across before and am a bit stumped.

A claimant gets about £8000 as a private pension and £50 per week SRP. She lives in Council accommodation but pays it all to the Dominican Order, who give her an allowance of £1500 per annum and pays all of her bills.

I would have thought that we took all of the income into account when assessing the claim as she is voluntarily handing over the money to a third party but could do with some clarification.

Thanks

[Anonymous]

If she actually [i:9e85513b5f]receives[/i:9e85513b5f] the money herself, and then hands it over, I would certainly treat her as having the full income…what people do with their money once they’ve received it is their business.

[Anonymous]

And the payment of the bills? Are these charitable payments?

[Anonymous]

They’d be fully disregarded as charitable payments…and I don’t think you could take that line, anyway, effectively you’d be double counting her own income.

[John Boxall]

Without checking the regs, it might be worth looking into her relationship with the Dominicans. Is she, in effect, wholly maintained by them, which from your posting would appear to be the case, if so, should we be paying HB at all and what about CTB exemptions?

Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery. The blossom is blighted, the leaf is withered, the god of day goes down upon the dreary scene, and—and in short you are for ever floored.

Wilkins Micawber, Ch12 David Copperfield

[markp]

I agree with John Boxall here, your claimant may be affected by Reg 9 (1) (j). Certainly worth enquiring, but, if you do have to apply this, what about any HB/CTB OP?

(1) View it as claimant error in that she did not fully declare her relationship/ connections with the Dominican Order in the first instance therefore recoverable no question.

(2) LA error in paying HB/CTB without the above being checked, assuming she declared this from the outset? If so I would venture to suggest that this would be non – recoverable.

That’s my two penn’orth.

Do I know what I'm doing? The jury's out on that........................

[Anonymous]

I doubt very much if you could get a reg 9(1)(j) decision to stick. The situation is closely analogous to the arrangements with the Jesus Fellowship, where members of the Fellowship hand over all their income and are then housed, fed, clothed etc by the Fellowship. When we took the Fellowship cases to Court all those years ago, the judge was quite clear in his opinion that the ‘wholly maintained’ provision would not apply to the Fellowship who, in fact, were even more ‘maintained’ by the organisation than this lady is by the Dominicans.

[Anonymous]

Remember also that Reg 9 is not a means-testing provision, it is there to control dodgy tenancies. This claimant is a Council tenant. Reg 9(1)(j) seems to me to be aimed at those claimants who are purportedly liable to make payments to the religious order that maintains them – even then, as the Jesus Fellowship cases confirm, the wholly maintained test is a tough one. I think a person would only be wholly maintained by a religious order if they are totally reliant on the order for all their needs – so that any work they do is done in their capacity as a member of the order and not in a private capacity. Like monks toiling in the monastery gardens and eating the stuff they grow. I suspect the true target of the religious order provision are those orange people (sorry if that sounds rude, I cannot remember the name of the organisation, but they are widely known as “the orange people” aren’t they?). Some of them run a vegan restaurant in Soho, but the proceeds are ploughed into the order and the people doing the graft get food and shelter from the order.

In this case, the claimant receives her income independently of the religious order and chooses to give it away – not our problem, she has the income available for her own use if she wants to. It’s a bit like the gimmick that Militant Tendency used to have in election literature for union posts and so on – if elected I will only draw the average wage of a worker in my sector. In fact, they would draw their full salary and donate some of it to Militant – in a social security means test they would be treated as possessing the full amount because it passes through their hands and they have control over it.

[Anonymous]

[size=9:d293936bdb]Hare Krishna…Krishna Krishna Hare Hare…etc[/size:d293936bdb]

[Author]

Posts