Hello

My boy has the great good fortune to have a welfare rights worker for his father; otherwise he would have lost a week's JSA. Please read on.

A school leaver aged 19, his terminal date for CB was 31 August and he should therefore be entitled to claim JSA from the first Monday in September, which this year was the 3rd. Letters were written in August renouncing our claims for CTC and Child Benefit. JSA was claimed on 3.9.07. After a few weeks he was awarded and paid JSA but only from the 13th. The letter explained that there are 3 waiting days before payment but not why he should not, in that case, have been entitled from the 6th. A letter was sent, and a reply received from the local office stating that benefit is only payable from the second week in September.

I replied to the letter asking for the regulation which states the above, and there isn't one, of course. They have acknowledged that the lad is entitled to benefit from 6 September and changed their decision accordingly, blaming faulty guidance for the initial error.

Now then, if my boy was given a wrong decision based on faulty guidance this suggests strongly that all other school leavers in the same position in this area were also wrongly denied one week's JSA. And if this happened all over the country rather than just in our area there must be millions of young claimants all one week short in their benefits. It might be worthwhile ALL of us getting in touch with our local benefit offices to check that they have not underpaid their school-leavers in this way. At £46.85 per claimant that would represent, nationwide, a very large sum of wrongly unawarded benefit. Worth mentioning the next time the papers go on about overpayments and fraudulent claims, I'd say.

No response to this post. Am I to take it that this is just a local issue, then?

i'm not seeing anyone with this particular problem, but as you point out, few school leavers have a welf for a dad, prompting enquiry.

the DMG guidance appears to be correct.

>>>33037 In JSA the claimant is not normally entitled for the first three days of a JSP (DMG 20901). So once the conditions are satisfied, entitlement will start on the day after those three waiting days.>>>

i would have thought that the case would be a straightforward new claim, with the payment calculated by the computer system, and no off-line decision-making required. if the correct date of claim is entered, the payment ought to be correct. It obviously wasn’t, but what accounts for it? If the correct dates were input and an erroneous decision comes out, a specific systemic error is indicated, but I don’t think that conclusion can be reached by extrapolation from your son’s experience unless and until you have pinned them down on what exactly and specifically went wrong with his decision.

Was the’ faulty guidance’ explanation given in writing by any chance...? sifting reliable advice from verbal bullshit excuses seems to be one of the many great challenges of the whole CMS experience, at least here in brummieland, where it got off to a desperately bad start and near collapsed. CMS itself smacks of a massive systemic error resulting in underpayments, and I think there are lots of dangers in just firefighting and adapting...

Bearing in mind that loss of face to face contact through local office closures has not here been replaced by job-centre access (local jobcentres couldn’t cope with the call-centre fall-out traffic and have got tough. I don’t know whether this is local or national???) and the call-centre system blocks access to processors and anyone else but call-centre operators, written communications are also going down the pan fast – eg unintelligible reasons for disallowance requiring telephone call, then telephone call requiring persistence and knowledge to negotiate the obstacles of misleading and incorrect information given out in the course of the telephone call, before you get to the real nub.