Here's the situation: my client lives with her two children and has been claiming income support and full HB/CTB etc as a lone parent. Recently she married her long term boyfriend (also the father of her children). However he has never lived with them and still doesn't. He lives a couple of hundred miles away with his parents as he works there and can't afford to leave yet. He earns about £300 a week, and he hopes to move in with his wife and kids in 6 months or so. At the moment he visits every couple of weeeks to see them.

Her income support has been stopped on the grounds that she now has a partner who earns, and her tax credits are also being reassessed on that basis. HB seem fairly content to treat her as still single. So who's in the right?

I know that for HB and IS there are rules on temporary absence where couples are treated as the same household, but surely that can only apply where living together is already the norm. Looking at the tax credit rules though its a bit murky, and I can't figure out if they count as partners or not. If they do, could they claim WTC and CTC as a couple, while she gets IS on her own?

any thoughts appreciated!

recently happend to be reading on this - possibly on here? - and IMHO if they're married there's different rules from if they're just "living together " (or not, as the case might be....). I think they shouldn't have got married until he moved in.....although I might be wrong, i've a feeling i'm not...

The Income Support Regs define a "couple" as, amongst others, "a man and woman who are married to each other and are members of the same household".

In this case, whilst they are married thay are clearly not members of the same household. I would therefore argue very strongly that she retains her Income Support entitlement as a single parent untill he moves in with her.

On the face of it you are right, if they do not share a household then they are not a couple for purposes of the IS calculation. However I would have thought that there would still be a major problem as the husband is legally liable to maintain his wife and children. See CPAG pages 754-755.

For Tax Credits you must claim as a couple if you are married unless you are seperated and this seperation is likely to permanent or has been done under a court order. The fact this married couple have seperate households is therefore irrelevant for tax credits.

Derek