two claims but only one phone number - help!

I’ve had an enquiry and I would be grateful for any practical solutions.

The client is a lady who claims UC for herself.  She is also an appointee for her daughter, who has now reached adulthood and needs her own UC claim.

The client has been advised to make a telephone claim for the daughter, but when she rang UC she was told that they could not use her phone number for her daughter’s claim.  I’m assuming that this is becuase it’s already linked to her own claim? 

Has anyone found a solution to this, other than buying a second phone?  Is it right that claims by appointees need to be telephone claims?

Thanks,

Cordelia

How do LAs that are multiple appointees handle this?

Good question - I’ll ask our appointeeship team.

I am an appointee for a disabled UC claimant and I administer the claim online.  I use an email address for 2 factor verification, rather than my phone - when I log in they send a verification code to the email address.

Cordelia - 09 June 2023 01:20 PM

Good question - I’ll ask our appointeeship team.

All our corporate appointee clients who need a UC claim have online claims. We managed to set up a useful process with the local JCs when UC came in in our area and verification is done by email. A personal appointee may need to take ID docs into the local JC.

There is nowhere on the online claim to say the claimant has an appointee, so we just advise putting that on the journal and asking for an upload facility for the BF57.

Provided the appointee is ok with an online claim it is so much easier to manage.

Thank you everyone.

I’ve received this reply from our corporate appointees:

“Yes this has been a barrier for us, appointees were told they had to make telephone claims, dependant on the UC advisor processing the claim they can override the duplication of the phone number but text messages did not stipulate who it related to; obviously for mother and daughter this wouldn’t be as problematic. We are now processing new claims online and the majority of telephone claims have been transferred over now too.

If mum is able to, I’d suggest she creates an email address for her daughter with conditional forwarding to her email so she isn’t monitoring two accounts. On the online application there is the option to state ‘do not have own phone’ and therefore communication can be done via journal and email. I’d put a note on the journal for the work coach providing a phone number for contact explaining the reason, I think they too can then add this on to the claim later. “

My client is going to make an online claim - she already has a second email address that she can use. 

With gmail and outlook (and possibly other services?) you can use a ‘+’ to append aliases to existing email addresses. For example:

<[email protected]> and <[email protected]>

Both these addresses would go to the same inbox. What you put after the + doesn’t matter, it could be just a number, or f.ex: client1, client2, etc. It also arrives in your inbox under the aliased address, enabling you to automatically sort/label them.

Might be useful especially if you’re managing a lot of accounts.

That’s interesting - I’ll pass that onto our appointeeship team.

Thank you.