Incorrect Advice - Cancelling JSA Claim Then Reclaiming

Hi All,

This isn’t my client but a colleagues so I don’t have the full facts, but I was just wondering if anyone had any ideas.

Cl is an A8 national with 2 year old son here, no other family. Had been here for around 3 years claiming JSA when she was advised to cancel her claim and go for IS by staff at her local job centre.

She did this, claimed IS and was then told she didn’t have R2R with respects to IS. She has now been advised to claim JSA again but as her R2R is as a jobseeker only, I imagine her HB will be cut due to the new changes from 1 April 2014.

We don’t have any record of the Job Centre advice as it was in person. Is there any way to make a rapid reclaim of JSA and have the two claims linked due to an error?

Thoughts welcome.

In my experience the JCP are always misadvising people to do this.

I have done a few complaints and requested ex gratia payments in cases like this. With one case she got ex gratia payment covering lost JSA, CTC and HB/CTR for the 3 month period she missed out on. I’ve never had any success with getting a JSA claim backdated in this situation.

I’d start off with a written complaint to the local office. In my case they started by saying they were merely advising the claimant of her “options”. Shot themselves in the foot with that letter really as I just kept arguing that advising a claimant to claim a benefit they would not qualify for is not really an “option”.

Why not try a backdated JSA claim, assuming the gap is less than 3 months, and at the same time ask for an ex-gratia payment?

I dealt with a similar case about 18 months ago, where the client spent 6 months in a fruitless appeal of the IS refusal before seeking advice when the appeal was refused at Tribunal. In the meantime she had survived on handouts from friends. When we requested an ex-gratia payment from JCP we were told that as the front line staff in jobcentres are not trained to give complex benefit advice they would not be held responsible for the mis-advice.

I had to actually download a copy of their own regulations re “wrongful advice by an officer of the DWP”, pointing out that the regulations do not specify the wrongful advice MUST be given by someone trained in complex benefit advice, and send to them with a request to “please apply the enclosed” before we got the client a compensation payment and an apology.

It appears that the person who gave you that advice is blissfully unaware of the CD which decided, for the purposes of backdating under reg 19 of the Claims and Payments Regulation, that wrongful advice from an officer of the DWP included a security guard on the door.  How ironic.

I take the view that if they are not trained to give complex benefits advice then they should either not attempt to give it or should display a large disclaimer notice in each jobcentre along the lines of, “do not ask our advisers for benefit advice because they don’t know what they’re talking about”.

Says it all really:-)

It would be really lovely if JC staff would stop doing this, but it seems to rear its head with eye-rolling regularity. Such ‘advice’ may be well-intentioned but the difficulty & hardship it causes (especially, as you say, in view of the new rules) is incalcuable.

I too have had some success with ex gratia payments in these cases, as well as backdate requests. Indeed, I have an ongoing case that more or less exactly mimics yours (except that the client was advised to claim ESA rather than IS).

Thanks for your help. I’ll suggest the responses to the advisor - any tips on getting ex gratia payments even though it will just be her word against theirs?

I think she’s more concerned about losing her HB at the moment than anything else, but I suppose we could appeal any decision to remove this and argue that she should be treated as having one continuous claim.