Universal Credit and SIPP payments

Curious_Carol

 Both my daughters are on UC and PIP and are highly unlikely to be in any full time employment. My wish is to set up and fund an individual SIPP for each of them. My and their major concern is that it would affect their UC payments. I believe that so long as the money is and remains invested and not touched until retirement age that it is not classed as income? 

Does anyone have information that will clarify this please?

dunstonh

 I believe that so long as the money is and remains invested and not touched until retirement age that it is not classed as income? 

Correct.  Under current rules, it doesn't get included in any means test until then.

tacpot12

I can confirm that you are correct. So long at the money remains untouched until their state pension age (at which point Universal Credit ends), it will not be treated as capital when deciding on their entitlement to Universal Credit or calculating their payment. Schedule 10 of the Universal Credit Regulations 2013 The Universal Credit Regulations 2013  (and the Advice to Decision Makers Chapter H2) confirm this.

There are also websites that one would expect to have been 'fact-checked' by professionals, such as the Shelter website: Shelter Legal England - Universal credit capital rules - Shelter England that also confirm this. 

This gov.uk website doesn't list "Personal Pensions" as a form of money/savings/investment that you are required to inform the DWP that you have if you are claiming Universal Credit: Universal Credit: money, savings and investments - GOV.UK

It would be better if they confirmed that there was no need to inform the DWP about Personal Pension savings, but it is reasonable to expect the list of things you do need to tell them about to be reasonably authoritative. (They would not omit a major type of savings such as Personal Pension savings if it was not supposed to be ommited).