Advice needed re: possible benefit entitlement

woe-is-me_2

Hi, I hope someone can help me with this as I am completely confused by the information I have been given. Hopefully someone is in or knows of someone in a similar situation that can shed some light on it all.

I have tried to calculate if my family and I are entitled to any help with benefits through the entitledto website and rang the job centre to ask if they could confirm the calculations, however, the job centre have told me that the amounts given on entitledto are completely inaccurate !!

Our situation is like this, I am a disabled mother of 4 children, my husband and I have been self employed just over 3 years and over the past 12 months our financial situation as become pretty dire. The business is not doing as well as expected and we are finding ourselves with less and less to live on.

We have been in receipt of WTC/CTC, child benefit, carers allowance and DLA. We get no help with housing benefit or council tax benefit. I put all our details into the entitledto calculator and it said we were intitled to IS as well because of our low income. However, when I contacted the job centre to confirm this I was told that was incorrect and IS can not be paid as well as WTC although the entitledto website states it can ?

Having no knowledge of benefits and entitlements I am completely confused by the contradiction of information !! Does anyone know if WTC and IS can be paid at the same time and if IS is paid is DLA taken into account and deducted from any benefit paid. At the moment my DLA is not taken into account and although we are struggling financially at the moment I dont want to do anything that would make us even worse of than we already are

Many thanks in advance for any advice or help you can offer.

shameless-about-money

I have found entitledto.co.uk to be extremely accurate - for myself. Accurate to the penny.

I have Income Support Disability Premium, which you should get as a matter of course because you have DLA. I got my IS because of DLA.

Through that you are entitled to Council Tax Benefit. The DLA and CTB is slightly different since they require you to have made modifications to your home.

DLA is disregarded when any income calculation is made, so that is not a problem.

Also, I get IS Disability Premium AND WTC.

babyboo42

I'm confused.IS is payable to those who (or whose partner) work less than 16 hours a week and WTC is payable to those (or whose partner) work 16 hours or more,surely you can't be employed and unemployed at the same time?

suelees1

babyboo - if I remember rightly although an actual claimt for IS must work less than 16 hours pw, their partner can work up to 24 hours pw. Of course any entitlement would depend on income.

Please note this is not an answer for woe-is-me. If you have claimed HB and been refused because of excess income then I can't see how you could get IS as they use a very similar formula. Try to see a welfare benefits advisor face to face as yours is not straightforward query. Alternatively make a claim for IS and see what happens bearing in mind what I said above about the hours each of you work

woe-is-me_2

Thank you all for your replies

I honestly dont know if we have ever been able to get help with housing benefit or council tax, we've never applied Since we have worked although not earning much we just assumed that there was no help and just payed what was due without question.

It was just on the off chance that I thought about inputting our details into the calculator to see if there was anything we could claim. I think your right about seeing someone face to face and I'll try to get down sometime this week and hopefully things may become a little clearer then. The lady I spoke to at the job centre did actually quote those same working hours and was really friendly and helpful. I was just confused that entitledto quoted an amount that could be payable through IS but the lady at the job centre said that the site didn't give accurate calculations ! I'm sure it probably does fot the majority of people, however, as you say, mine isn't really a straight forward query

Morglin

If in doubt, apply - whatever the benefit.

Lin