Weird terminology on JSA review form

tahrey

Hopefully a fairly simple one, this - thanks to a combination of various fun circumstances I've now been stuck on JSA (somehow not moved over to UC, thankfully...) for a full year, and DWP have sent me a Annual Claim Verification letter. It is overall a bit cryptic, weirder still I've had two of them written in sublty different ways that arrived on the same day, but one in particular seems mostly concerned with updating my personal assets... which have rather obviously diminished steeply over the last 12 months but they still consider as being exactly the same as at August 2017 (!).

I think I can figure most of it out, but there's one thing on the list of currently lodged assets that I can't figure out, there's no key given for it, and google has proven no help with - "Cap tp N/K <500". Given that there's also "Bank A/C (current)", "Bank A/C savings", and the ever useful "other" on the list (which seems to be essentially "cash in hand"), I'm a bit confused as to what it could even be, as I don't have any liquidity beyond those three.

I'll try and get sense out of them via the freephone number come Tuesday, but in the mean time, does this seem familiar to anybody?

Another daft question that doesn't seem immediately worthy of a separate thread as it's essentially yes/no: can I claim/should I be claiming a (backdated?) reduction in my council tax for being off work? I already have a single occupant allowance, and I know that DWP themselves don't seem to offer any help. Haven't got very far trying to find out about it on the local (Birmingham) council website. If it's a yes then that's the better part of a grand over the last year that I could sorely do with recovering.

Thanks

calcotti

Can’t help with the JSA question but you should certainly apply for Council Tax Reduction (provided your assets are less than £16,000), however you will not be able to backdate more than a month and you will only get that if you have good cause for not applying sooner. See regulation 112
https://www.birmingham.gov.uk/download/downloads/id/968/council_tax_reduction_scheme_regulations.pdf

CIS

There is also ability to apply for a section 13A(1)(c) reduction in place of or in addition to council tax reduction and, although it has different rules, there is no specific limit on backdating.

Afraid_of_Kittens

The capital they hold is what you have previously declared.

tahrey

calcotti wrote: »

Can’t help with the JSA question but you should certainly apply for Council Tax Reduction (provided your assets are less than £16,000), however you will not be able to backdate more than a month and you will only get that if you have good cause for not applying sooner. See regulation 112
https://www.birmingham.gov.uk/download/downloads/id/968/council_tax_reduction_scheme_regulations.pdf

Assuming assets don't include the flat itself, then that's definitely a goer. Thanks for that link ... I somehow didn't turn that up last time I looked. :whistle:

I don't suppose "you made the information hard to find for the casual googler" and "was busy dealing with other more easily sorted benefit and retraining stuff" (as well as "was distracted for a while by a brush with death and a stay in hospital") counts as a good cause for not applying sooner?

Still, any money I can knock off my bills right now will be a considerable help in the weeks to come. Having projected things forwards through November... if it knocks off the full £91 they're taking per month, that easily makes the difference between hitting overdraft before I'm likely to get any work out of the training course (which keep getting knocked back for various dumb external reasons - originally it was supposed to be complete already, now it looks like the final module can't be done until December), and reaching December with only limited use of credit card (IE not building up enough balance that the interest then becomes a problem). If it can be reduced by half, that's still enough to just about zero-sum the bank balance with slightly heavier credit card use.

Backdating it all the way to when I actually started claiming JSA would be a considerable coup and make me much more comfortable through into the new year...

tahrey

CIS wrote: »

There is also ability to apply for a section 13A(1)(c) reduction in place of or in addition to council tax reduction and, although it has different rules, there is no specific limit on backdating.

I have absolutely no idea what that means, but it sounds promising so will be giving it a look :T

tahrey

Afraid_of_Kittens wrote: »

The capital they hold is what you have previously declared.

I'm sorry, I don't quite understand. Is that something to do with the "Cap typ N/K <500" line? The other stuff I understand, although it's also not clear quite what's included in "Other".

The figures are obviously whatever I told them when I first signed on, and have changed somewhat since then, but if I have a record of that (rather than it being something I signed off at the job centre) it'll be buried under a year of other paperwork by now, and other than knowing whether or not I need to update that particular line and to what, the old amounts are fairly irrelevant anyway...

calcotti

tahrey wrote: »

Assuming assets don't include the flat itself, then that's definitely a goer.

I assume you own or are buying the flat. Provided you are living there it is ignored.

sammyjammy

Afraid of Kittens is I think referring to your comment that your funds have depleted from the figure they are quoting. If you have never updated them on your capital funds then they will not know they have depleted, hence the letter.

Silvertabby

I would say that "Cap tp N/K <500" is just a glitch in the automatic letter generation software.

Happened all the time with LGPS letters. We'd generate a standard letter from the member's record, which would populate it with information gleaned from the record. When we had to manually drop data into the letter, however, if we didn't type it in in exactly the right place the programme didn't like it and could throw up some amazing gobbledegook into plain print.

tahrey

Silvertabby wrote: »

I would say that "Cap tp N/K <500" is just a glitch in the automatic letter generation software.

Happened all the time with LGPS letters. We'd generate a standard letter from the member's record, which would populate it with information gleaned from the record. When we had to manually drop data into the letter, however, if we didn't type it in in exactly the right place the programme didn't like it and could throw up some amazing gobbledegook into plain print.

That would probably explain why I can't find any other reference to it online, if it's just some random text that's barfed up from an internal database. Might also be why I've had two letters - the one without the figures could be their attempt to send me something without the garbage, with the benighted operator responsible for it only managing it by deleting the entire section... and not able to cancel the first letter. Think I might still give them a quick ring to check though.