New Child Benefit Rules 1
Claim 15476
This family consists of a couple, with 5 children, 1 of whom now a non-dependant adult. The father had been out of works for 9 months and was receiving Income Based Jobseekers Allowance.
He then found new full time employment, and with his earnings and tax credits the family no longer qualified for any Housing Benefit or Council Tax Benefit.
In November 2009, the rules for working out Housing Benefit and Council Tax Benefit changed to allow us to ignore Child Benefit when calculating entitlement. This means that more families will be entitled to benefit.
West Somerset Council benefits service is keen to ensure that as many people as possible are able to claim the correct amount of benefit entitlement. This will help to prevent deprivation and hardship in our community.
We checked our records to try to identify people that may now be entitled to benefit because of the new rules.
We sent a letter to this family with the change in legislation inviting them to apply again with the new rules which allowed us to ignore their Child Benefit.
The family enquired, after receiving our letter asking them to make a new application for benefit.
This family’s income had not changed however, because of the changes in benefit rules we were able to ignore £59.60 of their income when calculating their entitlement. They were now entitled to £41.67 a week in Housing Benefit and £11.17 in Council Tax Benefit.
This has made a big difference to this family by giving them £2747.68 a year in extra income, and so reducing some of their financial burdens. They can now spend more of their income on the family instead, of normal everyday expenses.