I have been to visit an elderly Chinese couple. They made a claim for Pension credit in October 05. They were granted Guarantee Credit back to October 2004. They made a claim for Housing Benefit about the same time which was also backdated for 52 weeks.

Housing benefit was then made aware that they had excess capital in October 2004 and have cancelled the claim (capital over 16K) and advised Pension Credit.

My Clients have a disable daughter who has been in a care home for 30 years which depresses his wife who speaks very little English.

My clients in the past have had large savings and his wife has been able to spend what she likes. Unfortunately she likes to gamble, (the Chinese are renowned for the gambling). In the year of backdated PC and HB she spent aproximatly £50k playing roulette.

My question is as my clients did not request HB or PC for the period 2004 -2005 is this a DWP error (they failed to enquire about capital in the backdated period).

If PC was cancelled due to deprivation of capital , would an addiction to gambling be looked at reasonable expenditure?

HB has been cancelled due to excess capital, but the claim was pasported due to being in receipt of PC so capital was not an issue.

Sorry for such a long posting… but my clients really believe they have not done anything wrong. My colleagues here are not too sympathetic as the money was gambled away but would have looked at it differently if they had paid for an operation for her daughter. I do not believe they have disposed of capital to enable them to acquire benefit.

Any help will be appreciated

Carrie

This relates strictly to the narrow issue of HB/CTB.

If the clmt was LAWFULLY on Guaranteed Pension Credit, the LA must disregard all income and capital <HBR(SPC) 26> (although, the LA still need to know of Attendance Allowance / DLA etc if there are any non-deps).

A clmt could quite legitimately have over £16,000 and be entitled to Pension Credit. The effect of the HB/CTB regs means that, so long as the clmt is entitled to the GUARANTEED element of PC, there is NO maximum capital limit for HB/CTB.

Just for clarity, if PC was the Savings Credit element only, then the £16,000 max would (normally) apply as usual.

Hope this helps.

Kevin, what if the GPC was paid in error as it was in this caase. My client did not ask for his PC backdated and due to the language barrier, he faild to fully understand his entitlment letter.

Thanks

I have in the past won an appeal for a claimant who had lost £60-70K gambling over about 18 months. The main issue was showing that he had gambled the money away. Once we showed that he had gambled the money, the tribunal accepted that it was not deprivation in order to obtain benefit, I think on the basis that anyone who gambled to that extent must have a gambling addiction which they couldn't control!

what proof did you provide to show that he/she had lost the money gambling?

We had proof he was a member of 2 casinos. We used his bank statements showing a number of withdrawals from a cashpoint inside one casino. There were also a very large number of withdrawals from a cashpoint just round the corner from the other casino. The pattern of withdrawals (often 2 or 3 withdrawals of £200 on the same day, all from the same cashpoint) fitted with his statement that he would take out £200, go into the casino, lose his money, and then go and get more money to try and win it back. We were also able to show that occasionally there were deposits of a few hundred pounds in cash, which represented the odd night when his luck was in and he came out ahead. On the balance of probabilities, his explanation as to what was happening, which fitted the pattern of withdrawals, was accepted.

It helped that we had a chair who is fairly claimant friendly and was willing to accept that people sometimes do spectacularly stupid things with their money. The client himself was clearly suffering from terrible guilt over having gambled away the money, which came from his late wife's life insurance.

It did take hours of poring over the bank statements, and certainly would have been very difficult to show if the statements didn't identify the cashpoints he'd used. It was only when I wondered why he was using the same town centre cashpoint (which wasn't his bank) for most of the withdrawals, and realised it was the closest one to the casino he said he usually went to, that I saw how I might be able to put the case. The evidence to back him up was circumstantial but it did fit exactly with his account of his gambling.

Don't know of any DLA caselaw to suppoort this, but it seems to me that someone with a gambling addiction to this degree needs continual supervision. I suppose the question is whether the addiction amounts to a mental disability.

If this has been successfully argued for DLA or AA before (does anyone know?) it would surely re-inforce your position on deprivation. And if your client hasn't already, maybe he could make a claim.

Another perspective is that the deprivation rule is about intentionally depriving yourself of capital in order to claim HB. Anyone who gambles is surely intending to gain themselves capital, not deprive themselves of it! No-one goes into gambling with the intention of losing (ie depriving themselves of) large amounts of money.

Simon