Terms & Conditions

[Anonymous]

We have a claimant who is a lone-parent student nurse.
She is receiving a bursary made up of a basic award, a child care allowance, a single parent’s allowance and a dependant’s allowance.
To work out her income our starting point has been to disregard the child care allowance in full. We then deducted the rates for books and travel and divided the remaining income over the number of relevant number of weeks to arrive at her weekly income figure.
She has appealed because the child care allowance is substantially less than her actual child care costs – she is asking that we apply the normal child care disregards for earners. (We will be advising her to apply for a DHP to help top up her HB/CTB).
But have we calculated her income correctly? Are we supposed to disregard the child care allowance when working out her income? Any comments would be welcome please.

[Anonymous]

Yes, you are right to disregard the child care allowance.

[Anonymous]

Which regulation refers to this please?

[Anonymous]

Will have a look for the reg, but this is in Circular A26/2004:

[quote:6be37c9fbc]Childcare grant disregards

4 Childcare costs are increasingly recognised in the student support system by specific grants. Up to now, grants for childcare have been disregarded by the creation of specific disregards for each scheme. The opportunity has been taken to simplify these disregards by creating a single disregard from grant income of any payment intended to meet the costs of childcare.[/quote:6be37c9fbc]

[Anonymous]

Reg 59(1)(h) of the HBR 2006 is the one, I think.

[Anonymous]

thank you – much appreciated!

[Anonymous]

Thinking about it, is there any reason why we couldn’t also disregard the excess that the claimant spends on her child care costs using Regulation 63 of the HBR?

[Anonymous]

You could only do that if you were disregarding the excess child care costs from income other than her bursary.

[Carol Meredith]

If she is working over 16 hours as well as being a student then yoiu could apply the child care disregard to her earnings in the normal way and she could claim child care costs in her tax credits. But if not I do not think you can disregard her excess child care costs.
Carol

[Anonymous]

ok thanks for all the comments!

[Author]

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