Student Finance Assessment

queline

My daughter has just received her assessment and when applying online, my husband did not include a non taxable lump sum he received when he retired and we did not include it in the financial statement as we thought it did not apply.

However, Student Finance England got wind of it because they asked for so much evidence of my husband's income, one of the documents I sent mention the lump sum. It has been very complicated because during the tax year of 2007/08 that the application is based on, he was off sick; receiving salary and incapcity benefit and then retired all during that year and this appears to have confused them completely. At one stage they actually lost some of the evidence and accused me of not sending it but as they returned it to us they clearly had received it so I had to send it all again. Each time I sent something it was by recorded delivery but when returned to us, they just stuffed it in an envelope with no indication of who was sending it and it was sent by ordinary post. Trying to talk to them is like trying to get blood out of a stone and they wouldnt talk to me until my daughter had gone on the phone to say it was OK for me to discuss her application!

The outcome of all this is that having discovered the lump sum, they have added that to my husband's total income for that year and it is too much for her to receive any portion of a maintenance grant.

We were under the impression that it is only taxable income that is taken into account, does anybody know if this is correct? Our income has now gone down considerably for subsequent tax years and quite frankly we feel it's none of their business whether we still have the lump sum or have spent all of it!

The whole application process is a farce and made as complicated as possible; is this a ploy by the Government in the hope that people will give up and thereby save them some money? :mad:

Lokolo

If you have a more than 15% change in income you can do a change in circumstances form and have grant based on those figures.

However if it was a non taxable income why did you include it...?

queline

As I have already said it was not my intention to include it, they took the information from a pension statement which I had to send as evidence.
Does the 15% apply to her first year or will it be for subsequent years, given that they make the assessment on tax year 2007/08 even though she doesn't go to Uni until September 2009?

queline

Have found the form you are referring to and will certainly complete it for both & my husband, thank you for your advice

Lokolo

queline wrote: »

Have found the form you are referring to and will certainly complete it for both & my husband, thank you for your advice

No problem, sorry I didn't reply earlier I wasn't sure what the answer was and have been bugging others to reply with the right one

Taiko

Lokolo, I got your messages. Pretty sure you know I'm not allowed to reply on this subject though, because it will be seen as me bashing the SLC again. I can only do that directly to them on the telephones now when they make mistakes.

Dying to help on this one, but my hands are tied by the gagging order I have in place about posting information on SLC practices on internet forums.