No longer eligible for ESA (Contribution based - support group)

AdamPD

It's been escalated again after another phone call.
Bank account is empty and I have bills coming out (or not) on the 20th.

AdamPD

Urgh, so I finally got an update, the payments page has been updated to reflect the proper amount I'm due each month, so the ESA reduction has been removed, finally.

But I also noticed the previous payments also have the ESA removed, but didn't think much of it,until I got this letter sent to me via the journal::

====
We owe you some money.

We've decided you're entitled to Universal Credit of £7998.57 from 30 July 2021 to 29 August 2023.

This is because of Other Benefits.

We've already paid you Universal Credit of £2272.95 from 30 July 2021 to 29 August 2023.

We owe you £5725.62. This is the amount left after taking away the Universal Credit we've already paid you.

We'll pay £5725.62 into your bank account.
====

Thrilled and excited of course, but reality kicked in pretty quickly, this doesn't seem right at all
I'm Dyslexic so numbers kinda go over my head, but it seems they're paying me for the money I've already received through ESA? 
So it looks like they're paying me for all the ESA deductions from when I originally claimed UC, cancelled, then reclaimed?
The figures may be right, but I'm not at all sure, but a years worth of ESA (from when I reclaimed UC in September 2022) would've been around £6700ish, so the figures don't match up somehow.

Alice_Holt

AdamPD said:

Urgh, so I finally got an update, the payments page has been updated to reflect the proper amount I'm due each month, so the ESA reduction has been removed, finally.

But I also noticed the previous payments also have the ESA removed, but didn't think much of it,until I got this letter sent to me via the journal::

====
We owe you some money.

We've decided you're entitled to Universal Credit of £7998.57 from 30 July 2021 to 29 August 2023.

This is because of Other Benefits.

We've already paid you Universal Credit of £2272.95 from 30 July 2021 to 29 August 2023.

We owe you £5725.62. This is the amount left after taking away the Universal Credit we've already paid you.

We'll pay £5725.62 into your bank account.
====

Thrilled and excited of course, but reality kicked in pretty quickly, this doesn't seem right at all
I'm Dyslexic so numbers kinda go over my head, but it seems they're paying me for the money I've already received through ESA? 
So it looks like they're paying me for all the ESA deductions from when I originally claimed UC, cancelled, then reclaimed?
The figures may be right, but I'm not at all sure, but a years worth of ESA (from when I reclaimed UC in September 2022) would've been around £6700ish, so the figures don't match up somehow.

    That is confusing.     

   By my rough calculations (and assuming the £5725 is entirely due to ESA deductions), UC are assuming that your ESA payments stopped in the second week of November 2022.

     Month to 29/8  ESA deductions of £561 pm (23/24 rates)
     Then if you work backwards by month  (and using £509 pm for the 22/23 rates prior to April 2023) -
     The £5725 equates to approx 10 months and 3 weeks of ESA payments. 

   However, I think I recall that your actual ESA payments stopped 2 months back ? But ESA seemed confused about this, giving you a different date as to when your ESA entitlement ended ? 

   I'd ask UC for a detailed breakdown of how the £5725 had been calculated.  As, I'm wondering if ESA may come back with an overpayment demand.  You will need to be sure that if this happens, that both UC and ESA are using the same date / time period.    

   
    Edit;   My guess is that ESA have told UC that your entitlement ended around the second week of Nov 2022. Whereas your actual payments didn't stop till a couple of months back.
     Whether ESA will realise that these dates don't coincide, and then ask for repayment is anyone's guess.

     
     

AdamPD

I'm glad someone is better at math than I, heh
Thanks Alice.
Yea it's very confusing, because I was given multiple dates on when ESA should've been stopped
I vaguely recall it being May of this year, then someone else said September of last year.
I'm going to leave a journal message to ask them to double check it, just to cover myself.

NedS

AdamPD said:

I'm glad someone is better at math than I, heh
Thanks Alice.
Yea it's very confusing, because I was given multiple dates on when ESA should've been stopped
I vaguely recall it being May of this year, then someone else said September of last year.
I'm going to leave a journal message to ask them to double check it, just to cover myself.

Yes, send a journal message to ask them to check the end date of the ESA as it doesn't look right.

Assuming they have made a mistake, once they realise (and they will eventually), you will have to repay any overpayment.

AdamPD

Yea, already done.
As much as I could do with that money for some emergency repairs in my bathroom, it's just not worth not investigating further.

Newcad

You need to be a bit careful here.

Overpayments and Underpayments in this kind of ESA/UC situation get complicated.

Normally you would expect DWP Debt Managment to reconcile overpayments due to one benefit by taking them from underpayments due for another benefit before paying anything out.

But for technical/legal reasons this isn't happening when it's ESA and UC that are involved.

In these cases they are paying out the underpayment of UC and then reclaiming the overpayment of ESA.

There are threads about it on Rightsnet, it's a bit complicated but is set out here:https://www.rightsnet.org.uk/forums/viewthread/19599

The upshot being as it says in that Rightsnet post:

Instead of offsetting a ..... NS ESA overpayment against a UC underpayment they wanted to pay a large amount of UC and recoup a large amount of NS ESA.

So you will be due to now get an overpayment letter from ESA.

AdamPD

Newcad said:

So you will be due to now get an overpayment letter from ESA.

I suspected as much, what a weird system, you'd think they would just pay the missing ESA payments for the last 2 months.

AdamPD

I just wanted to say thanks to everyone for the advice, it's been a great help.

AdamPD

Just wanted to post an update.
UC did a breakdown for me as to why I was paid the amount I Was so I thought the matter was solved, but I did expect to hear from ESA and wow, today I did.
I just opened a letter dated the 17th of October saying:

From 06/08/2021 we paid you £11539.00 of New Style ESA. This amount was not calculated correctly. We should have paid you £0.00
So in short, they now want the full £11539.00 back

Uh, wow, I'm sitting here stunned. This is more than double the £5762 UC paid me last month.
I don't even know where to start with this.