Hello,

Can anyone confirm if remand prisoners can get help towards their mortgage interest payments if they were not on JSA/IS before they went into custody. My understanding is that an IS claim can be made, but can only include help with housing costs. However I cannot see how people in this situation can satisfy the relevant waiting period.

Client in question is a single person who has been on remand since September 2007. Initially JCP advised that he wasn't entitled at that time because he had not satisfied the waiting period (which they said was 39 weeks). More recently they have revised the decision to reiterate this and have also said that a period on remand does not contribute towards the waiting period and that the client is therefore not entitled to receive any help while in prison.

My feeling is that they are probably correct, but information available seems to be contraditory so any help or advice would be much appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

Sandra Pierre
Welfare Rights Officer
Greenwich Council

My feeling is that the waiting period is satisfied.

Remand prisoners, or those awating sentence following conviction, are not excluded from entitlement to income support, but they have an applicable of nil plus housing costs (schedule 7, para 8 IS regs).

The waiting periods (schedule 3 paras 6 and 8) refer to entitlement rather than receipt. The difference between these concepts has been the subject of a fair amount of caselaw and it is generally accepted that entitlement exists even where benefit is not paid. Therefore, I would suggest that housing costs can begin once the relevant qualifying period has been served.

I agree, and, so do CPAG (see p627). Its also quite obvious if you read paragraph 8 as a whole. 8(b) says remand prisoners or prisoners awaiting sentence are entitled to housing costs, while 8(a) says other prisoners, i.e. those who have been sentenced, are not.

If there were no entitlement to housing costs for remand prisoners then there would be no need to frame the regulation this way. And, as Tony says, there is a distinction (well settled by now, surely) between receipt and entitlement (just look at underlying entitlement to Carers Allowance for the purposes of the SDP as an example of this).