Permanent Health Insurance

Gordon, thanks for the reply. On the PHI (employee continued contract of employment basis) always being counted as income for the ESA(IR), is that quoted anywhere in the legislation, as the only references I can find are the two parts I quoted?

Also does anyone know what the section of the 2008 ESA regulations I referred to about not including any remuneration paid by or on behalf of an employer to the claimant who is absent from work, because the claimant is ill, refers to? It seems a strange wording to put into the 2008 regulations, if it does not refer to a sickness payment such as PHI from an employer.

I know the PHI income my wife receives does not effect the CB based ESA and it did not reduce her IB either, so I am going to see if I can find out about the above wording, as that might be a big help to people in the same position.

It seems very unfair that employers based their PHI scheme payments on a set percentage of salary less the rate of IB, to then have this new legislation ignore that agreement and stop a large part of someone’s income.

If I can find out anymore on this wording and its meaning, I will post it in a new thread.

boo wrote:

Gordon, thanks for the reply. On the PHI (employee continued contract of employment basis) always being counted as income for the ESA(IR), is that quoted anywhere in the legislation, as the only references I can find are the two parts I quoted?

Also does anyone know what the section of the 2008 ESA regulations I referred to about not including any remuneration paid by or on behalf of an employer to the claimant who is absent from work, because the claimant is ill, refers to? It seems a strange wording to put into the 2008 regulations, if it does not refer to a sickness payment such as PHI from an employer.

I know the PHI income my wife receives does not effect the CB based ESA and it did not reduce her IB either, so I am going to see if I can find out about the above wording, as that might be a big help to people in the same position.

It seems very unfair that employers based their PHI scheme payments on a set percentage of salary less the rate of IB, to then have this new legislation ignore that agreement and stop a large part of someone’s income.

If I can find out anymore on this wording and its meaning, I will post it in a new thread.

Hi,

Can i ask does the policy specifically state that it will take off IB/ESA payments regardless of weather the policy holder is in receipt of them or not.

The reason i ask this is that my friend gets PHI payments from a personal polcicy she took out some years ago and her policy states that the maximum benefit she will recieve is 60% of her income prior to disability and deductions from that 60% will be made if she was getting "income replacement earnings", such as a pension, ESA, etc. Her IB is deducted (she still has to migrate onto ESA) only because she is getting it!!!!

As her PHI was a personal policy she took out and personally paid for,payments have been disregarded by DWP.

i hope this helps

Radhika.

Thanks Radhika.

I think that is one of the problems, i.e. that all the policies are slightly different and they are paid differently, but the DWP cannot cope with anything that does not fit into their normal rules and regulations.

For example, if it is a group PHI scheme arranged by the employer, it is the employer that is the insured and they are paid the benefit by the insurer. They then decide how much of that money (usually all) they pay to the employee. The employee then pays tax and NI contributions on the income and, therefore, it is in effect sick pay and not PHI or a pension.

I guess we will need to wait for the HR departments of the big companies to catch up with this change to ESA and see what action they take. In the meantime if my wife does not get placed into the support group, I may try to challenge this idea of sick pay being counted as though it was a pension for income purposes, which it clearly is not. I still think that this is covered under the section I quoted above and I will see if I can investigate that further.

The other time bomb that is ticking for anyone with PHI type payments is the disregard rule, that applies to PHI claims started before 2001. I have read that this concession is set to finish at the latest in 2020, so that could catch out a lot of claimants’ still on CB based ESA, even if they are in the support group at that time. Still at least we have time to plan for that as it is 7 years away, unlike the ESA changes where we have been given just 12 months!

I think this thread has now run it's course, plus strictly speaking Permanent Health Insurance isn't a social security benefit and therefore is outside the scope of moderators terms of reference.

Therefore, I am locking this thread to new posts.