Jobseekers Allowance and casual work

Programmer

I've offered to help a friend who has been bamboozled by bureaucracy, only to have my own poor brain tied in knots.

He is claiming job seekers allowance (JSA) but an opportunity has come up to do some very occasional (once a month or less) casual work from a friend who organises events. These casual jobs will always be single day (8 hours). The money involved is trivial (a few hundred pounds per year at most) but he is anxious to keep within the law so he wants to declare it. The jobseekers office (whatever it's called now) has given him a couple of forms to fill in (A15C 12/08 and B7 10/10) but I can't work out how they apply to irregular work. The info on the government website, including dwp019.pdf which is supposed to tell you everything about JSA, is no use at all.

A couple of questions about money first of all.

1. How much, if anything, can a JSA claimant earn without losing his JSA? If he earns £60 on one of these occasional days, and his JSA is £50, will his JSA be stopped that week, or only reduced? There is something in dwp019 about Share Fishermen being given a £20 per week allowance, and I have seen a forum comment somewhere mentioning a £5 per week allowance, but I've not come across anything definitive for non-Share Fishermen.

2. Assuming the dwp makes some sort of deduction to the JSA, can the deduction be made over more than one week? In the example above, ignoring possible allowances, would the dwp deduct £50 for week one (i.e. pay nothing) and resume full payment from week two, or would they deduct another £10 in week two to make a total £60 deduction? Or, if he earned £120 (again, all on the one day), would his JSA be nil, £50, £50 or nil, nil, £30?

Now onto the forms. B7 makes some kind of sense as it has columns for earnings in 'week 1' and 'week 2' so doesn't assume regular work. But A15C does. It asks questions like gross pay and hours worked per week which are not answerable for someone doing occasional work. My questions about this are:

3. Even though my friend only works maybe one day every six weeks for this friend of his, does that friend count as his 'employer' (as per A15C)?

4. Is A15C really applicable? Should he just fill in the bits he can and annotate the grey space for the bits that don't apply? In other words should he just assume the form was designed by an unimaginative civil servant?

That's it...hope there are some bureaucrats out there....

Prothet_of_Doom

Could he not register himself as self employeed (google IR35, but seems to me he's VERY freelance, and almost definately not a disguiised employee), and go from there.

Programmer

Prothet_of_Doom wrote: »

Could he not register himself as self employeed (google IR35, but seems to me he's VERY freelance, and almost definately not a disguiised employee), and go from there.

The earnings are too trivial for the self-employment option, which would doubtless entail another raft of bureaucracy and presumably require him to make NI payments. He is hoping to get some sort of proper job within a few months.

dookar

Programmer wrote: »

1. How much, if anything, can a JSA claimant earn without losing his JSA? If he earns £60 on one of these occasional days, and his JSA is £50, will his JSA be stopped that week, or only reduced? There is something in dwp019 about Share Fishermen being given a £20 per week allowance, and I have seen a forum comment somewhere mentioning a £5 per week allowance, but I've not come across anything definitive for non-Share Fishermen.

Assuming he's single, no kids, able bodied etc there will be a £5 disregard. If his JSA is £50 then the £60 earnings will reduce it to nil - £5 disregard makes the earnings £55 which is more than the JSA.

Programmer wrote: »

2. Assuming the dwp makes some sort of deduction to the JSA, can the deduction be made over more than one week? In the example above, ignoring possible allowances, would the dwp deduct £50 for week one (i.e. pay nothing) and resume full payment from week two, or would they deduct another £10 in week two to make a total £60 deduction? Or, if he earned £120 (again, all on the one day), would his JSA be nil, £50, £50 or nil, nil, £30?

JSA is a weekly benefit and any earnings will be attributed on that basis - ie the week in which they are earned is the week that JSA will be affected.

Don't know anything about the forms, sorry

Programmer

Thanks Dookar this is just what my friend will want to hear. He thinks he will earn in excess of £50 on most of these casual days in which case he won't lose all of it (or all of over £5 per week)