ADM H1050 and PIP; H1767 and cost-of-living payments

Hello again. My friend is coming near to the end of their first assessment period for their migration to UC that I am helping them with. They have had to report, as expected, their capital, in the sense of declaring the amounts in each of their bank and building society accounts.

I'm carefully reading all the regulations and manuals to make sure they're getting everything they're entitled to. However, I can't see how the information that the system asks for for is enough to satisfy the following two rules:

(1) Disregard of Cost-of-Living payments (providing the balance has never gone below the running sum of those payments) - H1767 of the ADM Chapter H1 cites Social Security (Additional Payments) Acts 2022 s.8 and 2023 s.8, asserting that these should be permanently disregarded. That's a permament disregard of £1850 for all related payments. But there is no question in the UC interface about Cost-of-Living disregards.

(2) Disregard of income received within the current assessment period, since H1050 says, "Income becomes capital if it has not been spent by the end of the assessment period after the one in which it was received." So, if the assessment period (for simplicity) was the same as a calendar month, and a PIP payment was received in March, it surely shouldn't be regarded as capital until the calculation at the end of April? But there is no way to declare a deferred capital increase like this.

That said, there are lots of comments on the internet about income being capital at the end of the *current* assessment period, but that is not consistent with H1050, so maybe I've missed something.

* * *

We have asked the Payments and the Work Coach categories about (1), with no response except that the latter said they'd forward the question to the Jobcentre. Given the tens of thousands of migrations taking place, I'm getting the impression that there aren't enough resources to answer questions right now. We haven't asked about (2) since we want to be sure that we understand the rules first.

My questions become:

a) Should we re-declare the relevant account balance subtracting the total of all Cost-of-Living, and declare that we have done this in the journal, following H1767?

b) Should PIP income be ignored from the point of view of declarations of changing capital until the *following* assessment period, in order to follow H1050?

That seems to be the most sensible method, and then if they want to do an audit/review/whatever they call it, they can see that the final amount paid is correct.

...orrrr should we declare the gross balance, wait for them to calculate things possibly wrongly (since as noted they don't seem to be following up journal entries), then put in a request for manual correction in arrears and wait for an eventual backpayment? I can't imagine this working every month capital changes by £250...

Thank you!

Hi David, thanks again for replying, and for reassuring us that cost-of-living payments are disregarded.

I should have been more clear in my previous post, sorry - I am talking around £11,000 of gross capital, i.e. before any disregards are taken into account. which I think means that (fortunately) for now it's simply a question of how much "tariff income" should be calculated every month rather than whether the £16,000 limit is exceeded.

I think the main takeaway from your response is that we should just leave the capital declarations as representing the actual amount in the accounts, and wait for end of assessment period to see if the DWP have actioned the repeated journal messages even without responses. If they have not then we will argue that an underpayment has occurred. In other words, DWP might not take kindly to us trying to take disgards off for them without their approval, even if we say that this is what we have done!?

As for PIP payments (or indeed any income, but PIP + UC form all the regular income my friend now has) within the current assessment period, am I right please that these should not be regarded as capital until the end of the *following* assessment period? Or am I misinterpreting H1050? Maybe it's not like the CoL rules and any expenditure is regarded as being taken out of the PIP first, even if the bank balance never goes below the value of that payment.