ATOS Medical, benefits suspended - advice required

tcr_3

dvs wrote: »

An update:

DWP agree that friend has a valid case for an appeal. They have said that the appeal could take between 3 and 6 months but they will pay 80% of the basic rate (which excludes the disability premium he was getting). This gives him around £52 per week rather than £93 he was getting. We're still waiting for confirmation about how this will be paid. They had paid the full rate up to 19th August. In their letter dated 25 August they backdated the cancellation of his benefits (still have not got an explanation from them about this). The most recent letter stated that his benefits were reduced on 2nd July and cancelled from the 9th July. If the reduced rate takes effect from 2nd or 9th July, then he won't receive any money for several more weeks because he has been overpaid. I'm hoping that they will take the new rate from when his benefits actually stopped but I somehow doubt it.

If your friend's been paid to 19/08/10 that's the date they've been overpaid to. So they'll be paid at the new rate from 20/08/10 onwards.

Income Support will arrange for the overpayment to be calculated. That might take many weeks. Your friend will then have the opportunity to appeal against the overpayment on the grounds that he himself wasn't told about the Incapacity Benefit decision until August ... and if he didn't know the decision, how could he inform Income Support ? That it wasn't his fault the overpayment happened, it was DWP's for advising him so late and that they should treat the overpayment as an "official error" and not compel him to pay it back.

Benefits_Bod

tcr wrote: »

...they should treat the overpayment as an "official error" and not compel him to pay it back.

Constructive addition...

Where DWP overpayments are at issue (i.e. not including HB/CTB/tax credits) the recoverablity of an overpayment primarily hinges on whether or not the overpayment arose as a result of either a misrepresentation on the part of the claimant* or by the claimant's* failure to disclose a material fact. An error by the DWP in itself doesn't matter.

So, if the DWP had all the info, any resulting o/p is not recoverable under the law as it currently stands (this may change in future).

* "Claimant" includes those with Power of Attorney and those that are appointees under benefits legislation.

divastrop

A similar thing happened to me regarding overpayment although it wasn't for as long a period. It took over a week for the medical decision to get through to income support and I got worrying letters saying I'd been overpaid and may have to pay it back etc, but in the end the DWP said it was not a recoverable overpayment. It must be very difficult for your friend to have all this going on while still being seriously ill. I hope everything goes OK with the appeal.