I have a service user who is severly mentally imapired and has just moved out of long term institutional care as a hospital in-patient. he has moved into a shared ownership accommodation (75% mortgaged and 25% rented from Advance Housing).

An income support application was made and awarded from the initial date of move. However, service user is having to serve the waiting period of 39 weeks before any help towards mortgage payments. This is because prior to moving service user was and still is on SDA. Unfortunately, SDA is not a qualifying benefit to be exempt form the waiting period.

I have appealed against this decision on the grounds that there is discrimination between people on IB and those on SDA. The only other alternative is to argue on age discrimination: If SDA not allowed the argue that this will be seen as age discrimination – i.e. if on SDA and on the 1st April 2001 you were under the age of 20 then you would automatically be on IB. However, if older then you would stay on SDA, as is the case for this service user. This would discriminate purely on basis of age.

I am awaiting some advice from Public Law Project regarding this however if anyone else has any relevant information please let me know.

Thanks

Not absoluely sure here - what do others think? IS regs sch3 para 14(5)(b) effectively says that the 39 week waiting period starts from the beginning of a period of incapacity for work (without a protective claim)if, although the claimant is not entitled to CBJSA SSP or IB, they are entitled to NI credits. Someone receiveing SDA gets NI credits so I would have thought they would have been included in this.