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Miscalculation of TP Erosion?
Well done. So when they told you “because their increases in the amount of UC, ESA and PIP that they are getting are more than the transitional protection”, they were basically lying through their teeth as they didn’t have a clue what had happened.
100% it’s abundantly clear that person we were corresponding with on the journal didn’t understand what was wrong and so was just trying to find anything to make us shut up and go away, accuracy be damned.
I’ll leave the reader to imagine what might happen to any of us if we took such a cavalier approach to accuracy in our advice work…
The reason appears to be that there was a change in Housing Costs which the UC system ended up treating as new housing costs rather than just a small increase to existing costs due to a short delay in verification (it crossed over assessment periods, so when it was verified in the next assessment period it ended up being seen as new housing costs). This of course was way more than the TP hence the erosion to £0.
Ahh, well at least this is an explanation which makes sense - within the UC computer system anyway, if not the law. The computer has been tricked into applying erosion by a wrinkle in the data. Perhaps something that others can keep an eye out for.
It’s still very troubling that the CM’s response to this issue being raised has just been to take a wild guess at some superficially plausible explanation for what the computer has spat out and to double down on it when challenged. The obvious point is that if you’d accepted their nonsense explanation, the error would have gone unresolved. This sort of thing really seems to have become standard practice for a lot of CMs - just say something in an authoritative voice to make the question go away.