(This is the £40 pw for 52 weeks for lone parents going to work after being on IS/JSA for over a year).

Have a client who should have qualified when she went back to work last July but she hadn't claimed.

She says she attended an (erroneously arranged) work focused interview about 5 or 6 weeks after going back to work and was told she was too late.

Where are the rules for this scheme? Anyone know?

Any info gratefully received!

Return To Work Credit should be claimed within 5 weeks of the work start date.

Forgot to add, that DWP should automatically notify any claimant who may be entitled of the RTWC.

John - thanks for that.

I would like to go to JCP and ask to be compensated on the basis that clt should have been informed as you say.

But I don't have a rule or a regulation or a guidance note to wave in their faces.

Any ideas?

I had a similar ( but not identical ) case - client had claimed in time via her PA at JCP but the form was never processed or was lost. She only found out some time after while chasing her PA for news. She then put in another claimed which was declined as out of time.

We have good relations with our JCP manager so I e-mailed him a complaint and they paid on the fresh claim with full backdating. I got the impression from this that the rules on in work credit can be stretched somewhat as the law says very little as far as I am aware.

So I would go for a complaint linked to a new claim and ask for that to be treated as in time. If not you would have to go down the formal compensation route.

Cool - will have a bash.

Thank you!

I am helping update the Welfare to Work Handbook for Inclusion and have tried fruitlessly locating the legislation governing In Work Credits. I suspect that they derive their legal authority from the same general source used to create things like the Travel to Interview Scheme payments. I did track that down some years ago in the Employment and Training Act 198?, but have forgotten it.

If you search the Jobcentre Plus website, there is a limited amount of detail of how the In Work Credits work and who qualifies, but that's as far as I got.

It's very unsatisfactory that we are seeing a drift towards income maintenance being based outside the social security legislative framework with no rights of appeal.

Employment and Training Act 1973 s 2. See also:

Tax Credits (Miscellaneous Amendments) Regulations SI 2004/762, reg 14

Finance Act 2008, s 46

Tax Credits (Miscellaneous Amendments) (No. 2) Regulations 2008 SI 2008/2169, reg 4.