Student finance and housing benefit

mrgunde

Bit of a long story, please bear with me.

My brother was made redundant earlier this year. He'd worked for the local hospital trust as an IT technician since he was 18 and he's now 26. He had to move back home with our mum because he could no longer afford his share of the rent and bills in an apartment he was living in with a friend.

To cut a long story short, he has taken the whole thing very badly. He has Asperger's syndrome and he can't cope very well with change and although he's really talented with computers and programming, he struggles with interviews and applications for jobs and generally finds it quite hard to communicate with people.

We've decided the best thing for him would be to do a foundation degree at the local college in my Mum's town. The thing is, my mum receives housing benefit and we are not sure if his receiving student finance whilst living in her house would affect that. It would just be the two of them in the household. My mum is still working, but she doesn't earn a great deal.

Any help on this would be much appreciated.

Dunroamin

mrgunde wrote: »

Bit of a long story, please bear with me.

My brother was made redundant earlier this year. He'd worked for the local hospital trust as an IT technician since he was 18 and he's now 26. He had to move back home with our mum because he could no longer afford his share of the rent and bills in an apartment he was living in with a friend.

To cut a long story short, he has taken the whole thing very badly. He has Asperger's syndrome and he can't cope very well with change and although he's really talented with computers and programming, he struggles with interviews and applications for jobs and generally finds it quite hard to communicate with people.

We've decided the best thing for him would be to do a foundation degree at the local college in my Mum's town. The thing is, my mum receives housing benefit and we are not sure if his receiving student finance whilst living in her house would affect that. It would just be the two of them in the household. My mum is still working, but she doesn't earn a great deal.

Any help on this would be much appreciated.

Your mother will receive a non dependent deduction from her HB because your brother is living there (lots of threads about this on the Benefits Board) but your brother's student funding package will allow him to more than cover this and of course your mother will be able to split bills etc with him and should be rather better off.