Now I may be being really stupid but I thought that the amounts in CTC were carefully aligned with those for children in IS so that for the majority of claimants it would make no difference financially whether they were still claiming for their children through IS or transferred to CTC.

However, on doing a calculation for someone today I discovered that having 4 children the client is approximately £56 better off PER WEEK on IS than she would be transferring to CTC. I have double checked my calculations and they tie in with what IS and CTC have calculated too.

I haven't done one of these calculations for a while - my vague memory is that when CTC first came in they were aligned - if so when did this cease to be the case and when did the differential become so large?

And what's happened about the date for migration from IS to CTC - the last I heard some time ago was December 08 but suspect this is not going to be the case since there has been nothing said about it. However, when it does happen, unless there is transitional protection a number of people are going to be significantly worse off.

Any thoughts?

It is monday morning! Just had it pointed out to me by my colleague that i'd failed to take into account child benefit!

Hi Daphne - the amounts are still aligned and in many cases the total amount payable would be the same.

£56.45 would be the figure for ChBen which counts as income* if your IS includes children's allowances but is disregarded if you're on CTC.

So I'm wondering if

a) you've forgotten to take the ChBen into account on the IS only side; or

b) you've forgotten to disregard the ChBen on IS+CTC side.


(* - that is apart from the £10.50 baby disregard of ChBen which balances out the baby rate of CTC-Family Element)


Regarding migration - it seems to have gone very quiet!

Jon