Closing my UC claim as I reach state pension

Carefulspender1

I will be retiring in July at which point I will be getting my state pension plus a very small old workplace pension which will also give me a lump sum taking my savings over the £16k limit.

As I will be away on a holiday  when this happens I was intending to report going over the savings limit on my return and then letting UC close the claim which I was told was ok to do. However my partner spoke to their work coach last week and was told that if we do this I have to take proof of the lump sum in to them to get the claim closed when I return from holiday. The work coach also went on to question us about going away and being very insistent on wanting to know where we were going and not in a chatty manner. The work coach also insisted that despite knowing we will be closing the claim, my partner still has to attend a work coach interview on our return.

To be honest it felt really intrusive and almost as if  we weren't allowed to holiday to celebrate the end of my working life.

I didn't want to deal with this whilst I am away but my intention now is to close the claim myself while we're away on holiday rather than reporting a change on our return and enduring the visit to the offices mentioned.

I'm just wondering if this heavy handed approach is normal UC practice at the end of a claim where we have always been polite and open about our situation with the UC staff and never had this issue before. I would add that every appointment in the past 6 months has been with a different member of staff (11 different work coaches between us) and each coach has told us something different.  Any comments would be much appreciated, many thanks.

huckster

With UC, where one of a couple is of state pension age and their partner is below state pension, this is known as a mixed age couple. And the claim could be continued until the younger partner reached state pension age.

The reason they want to establish capital before closure, is that you could spend most of the capital on frivolous spending e.g. cruises and sports car and then months down the line make a new claim for UC as a couple, trying to continue claiming UC.  Spending in a way that would be seen as frivolous to get the capital to below £16k in order to claim UC later, would be seen as deprivation of capital, when you could have used some of the capital to provide for living expenses and not needed to have claimed UC again.

With your state pension and any other regular pension being deducted £1 for each £1 of benefit, I am guessing that you would not receive any UC payment anyway.  What UC components do you have ? Is it just the couple standard allowance or do you have Housing rent costs as well?

I think if both yourself and your partner used the option on the claims homepage to request claim closure once you reach state pension age, they will probably just close the claim, even if at that point you had not provided evidence about the capital.

Carefulspender1

huckster said:

With UC, where one of a couple is of state pension age and their partner is below state pension, this is known as a mixed age couple. And the claim could be continued until the younger partner reached state pension age.

The reason they want to establish capital before closure, is that you could spend most of the capital on frivolous spending e.g. cruises and sports car and then months down the line make a new claim for UC as a couple, trying to continue claiming UC.  Spending in a way that would be seen as frivolous to get the capital to below £16k in order to claim UC later, would be seen as deprivation of capital, when you could have used some of the capital to provide for living expenses and not needed to have claimed UC again.

With your state pension and any other regular pension being deducted £1 for each £1 of benefit, I am guessing that you would not receive any UC payment anyway.  What UC components do you have ? Is it just the couple standard allowance or do you have Housing rent costs as well?

I think if both yourself and your partner used the option on the claims homepage to request claim closure once you reach state pension age, they will probably just close the claim, even if at that point you had not provided evidence about the capital.

Thanks Huckster - the holiday we're taking is certainly no luxury cruise (I wish!), just a staycation, so I certainly hope they don't think that's frivolous. Yes that's absolutely right, we wont receive any UC as we only qualify for the standard allowance, so my SP plus the very small top up from the old work pension would put us way over. I think us requesting claim closure is the way forward so thanks for your advice on this, it's much appreciated.