Son wants to work

Hi, can anyone advise on this please?

My son and his wife have both been on ESA, he has mental health issues and she has Crohns. He now wants to start getting back to work but feels he still needs the support of ESA rather than signing off and going to the job centre.

He has been advised by the CAB to become self employed but as the work he gets will be zero hours and intermittent (on the internet) he won't be able to say from one week to the next if he will be working or how many hours it will be.

He will also have to pay out various things like internet connection to be able to do this work so how would he represent that to the Job Centre? Not all the money he receives will be his to spend as a result.

Also, what does he need to do about housing benefit? His wife is still unable to work and will be remaining on ESA. Will there be any tax credits he can claim. They live in a rented property and have no children.

Thanks for any help.

Hi and Welcome to the forum, you might want to have a look at the following FAQ which explains where everything is

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This might be a situation where Permitted Work could be useful

Permitted Work

If your son does decide to close his ESA claim and start work, he can reclaim and go back to the same award as before as long as it is within 12 weeks of the date he closed the claim.

May I suggest that you bookmark/favourite this on your web browser now so that you can find it easily in future? This will allow you to return with further questions or comments about your son's ESA/work situation without having to start a new topic each time. It helps us enormously when everything relating to the same issue is kept in one topic - and I hope you will find it useful too

I have been self employed.
For housing benefit there is a form where you put down all income and expenditure. They then work out the net profit from that. However it can take up to 2 months to get sorted.
If he is working over a certain number of hours a week he can claim working tax credit, however he needs to meet the criteria for it being classed as productive work. The tax credit compliance look at various things such as a work diary, receipts, contracts etc and then make a judgement.
I went off incapacity benefit and got a £50 per week back to work grant, but not sure whether these still exist.