If you are aged under 60 you can make a claim for Carer's Allowance through the call centre (if you can get through) and when the claim is eventually processed the date of claim is treated from when the initial phone call was made to Jobcentre Plus.

If you are aged over 60 you cannot contact Jobcentre Plus to make the claim, so you have to phone either the Pension Service or the Carers Allowance unit of the DBC. They issue the form but the date of claim will be treated as when the form is recieved, thereby potentially losing a week or more benefit depending on how long it takes to complete the form and return it.

Who is right?

I have had 2 appeals heard by the regional chair recently to deal with this issue, and even he was confused, disallowed the appeal but granted leave to appeal to the Commissioners. Now sent the appeal in on the grounds that the notice of intention to claim should be treated as the date of claim, and that they have been discriminated against on the grounds of age (Art 14 with Protocol 1 of Art 1).

Anyone else got any ideas?

Thanks.

Steve H

Stephen

I'm afraid that they are both right and wrong. There is no provision under reg 6 of the C&P Regs to treat the date of claim for CA (unlike most other benefits) other than the date on which the claim form arrives at a relevant office. This goes for whether you are under or over 60.

This is true of ICB also. I think this is because you have up to 3 months statutory backdating. So the issue rarely arises.

If they are treating claims differently for people of different ages then imo they are acting unlawfully, as you say, on grounds of discrimination.

Furthermore, they do not have discretion to treat the date of claim as the date of telephone contact. That is because the language of reg 6(1) is mandatory and not permissive.

Regards
Paul

Thanks Paul, thats what I thought, unfortunately.

So I am proceeding on the grounds of discrimination because we have irrefutable written evidence that Jobcentre Plus treat the date of the phone call as the date of claim.