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My daughter is have problems with her local council. She contacted them to tell them of a change in circumstances in that her daughter was no longer living with her and was therefore requesting a recalculation of Housing Benefit.
They have been trying to recalculate and some of the problem were that my daughter subscribes to her employers share purchase scheme and money is taken out of salary each month. This amount is added back on to the nett pay so that is her income for benefits purposes, seems fair. Problem is that if she cashes some of the shares in they are paid back through payroll and so some months salary looks rather large. She has been trying to get them to understand that they are using the repayment as income when the sum has already been taken into account in the initial purchase. The council don't seem to understand that they are adding the same sum twice into the calculation. Complaints get met by an answer about the capital sum allowances for benefits rather than addressing the problem complained about.
While this complaint has been ongoing and not resolved she has received a demand for return of alleged overpayment of benefit, first £900 and then, a few days later, £1700 to be repaid within 14 days. The only additional details given were that this was for the period 2011 to 2017 ! There has been no explanation of how they arrived at these sums, it has been asked how can they suddenly find and error going back that far when they have conducted regular appraisals of salary etc over that period and how could they have made such a glaring error, and how were the alleged overpayments calculated.
Too soon for a response to the questions raised but what rights does she have to demand a complete and full breakdown of how they have calculated the alleged overpayment? The figures I've seen so far for calculation of benefits just seem to be figures pulled out of thin air with no rhyme nor reason to some of them.
They have been trying to recalculate and some of the problem were that my daughter subscribes to her employers share purchase scheme and money is taken out of salary each month. This amount is added back on to the nett pay so that is her income for benefits purposes, seems fair. Problem is that if she cashes some of the shares in they are paid back through payroll and so some months salary looks rather large. She has been trying to get them to understand that they are using the repayment as income when the sum has already been taken into account in the initial purchase. The council don't seem to understand that they are adding the same sum twice into the calculation. Complaints get met by an answer about the capital sum allowances for benefits rather than addressing the problem complained about.
While this complaint has been ongoing and not resolved she has received a demand for return of alleged overpayment of benefit, first £900 and then, a few days later, £1700 to be repaid within 14 days. The only additional details given were that this was for the period 2011 to 2017 ! There has been no explanation of how they arrived at these sums, it has been asked how can they suddenly find and error going back that far when they have conducted regular appraisals of salary etc over that period and how could they have made such a glaring error, and how were the alleged overpayments calculated.
Too soon for a response to the questions raised but what rights does she have to demand a complete and full breakdown of how they have calculated the alleged overpayment? The figures I've seen so far for calculation of benefits just seem to be figures pulled out of thin air with no rhyme nor reason to some of them.
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