ESA income and carers help

emmaBZ

Hello I wanted to ask if you get carers allowance of you are on ESA
I have a carer who is on ESA IR and put in a claim for carers but got a letter back saying he is entitled to carers but won't get any payment as he got ESA for those dates I thought you got a top up payment resulting in an extra £35 a week ok top of ESA of £73 a week should he of got the extra top up amount ?? anyone know if that's right

emmsie123

We got the top up. Maybe they think his on contribution based.

anmarj

Only income related esa will carry the premium, if they are on contribution the will have underlying enitlement only. They maybe need to apply for income related to see if they are entitled.

emmaBZ

Ok thanks but the letter from carers says he is on income related ESA ?

anmarj

Might need to call carers allowance then to clarify.

pmlindyloo

emmaBZ wrote: »

Hello I wanted to ask if you get carers allowance of you are on ESA
I have a carer who is on ESA IR and put in a claim for carers but got a letter back saying he is entitled to carers but won't get any payment as he got ESA for those dates I thought you got a top up payment resulting in an extra £35 a week ok top of ESA of £73 a week should he of got the extra top up amount ?? anyone know if that's right

Since you say that he 'won't get any payment as he got ESA for those dates this suggests that this may be a claim for backdating CA.

Is this correct?

Carer's allowance is counted as income for income based ESA and is deducted from ESA. Then a Carer's Premium is added so the claimant gets ESA minus the CA plus the Carer's Premium and then the CA is paid separately.

When the claimant asks for backdating they should backdate the CA but this would mean that the claimant had been overpaid ESA. So what they do is not pay the backdated CA and not claim back the overpayment of ESA - they cancel each other out (hope you are still with me!)

However, the claimant should get the Carer's Premium backdated so this should be an extra payment.

emmaBZ

Ah yes for backdated payment would that come rfrom carers or ESA ? but as he no longer gets ESA I guess he wouldn't recieve anything now ?

anmarj

You have confused me, you stated in your original post that the friend got ESA IR, but have now stated they do not get ESA now? Why has the ESA stopped?

emmaBZ

They no longer get ESA as have just started a pArt time job but the time when they were on ESA they were also caring for me the letter said they qualify for carers but couldn't make a backdated payment as they recoeved esa for that date I wanted to know if they will be recieving a backdated payment as they were entitled to it or not

anmarj

So you are saying he recevied £73 per week from ESA, this seems to point at being the assessement rate. It maybe that the premium cannot be paid as part of the ESA until they had the assessment done and if he did not have the assessment before he stopped the claim, then it might not be paid, it might be worth him giving ESA a call to clarify this.

dawyldthing

I know when I got carers allowance for my nan for a few weeks they took it out of her benefits and gave it to me as carers allowance so it could be what they are on about whe it says it's not retrievable after a certain length of time as they won't be able to take it off the other persons money