Before You Pay For Benefits Advice

Check the company out very carefully, and the deal they're offering, before you pay a penny.

We mention this because a decidedly dodgy company has come to our notice:

www.chroniclelive.co.uk/north-east-news/todays-evening-chronicle/2008/11/29/scamster-as-just-a-first-class-fool-says-victim-72703-22368270/

This news article is a year old but the company, and the man who started it, are still operating in the north west.

Some-one who uses the rightsnet website has recently reported the company to their Trading Standards Department for putting misleading information on their website.

No organisation can guarantee that you will get any particular benefit you claim, and no particular illness or ailment is guaranteed to get you disability living allowance (or attendance allowance). All any can truthfully say is whether you appear to qualify and whether they will do their best to help you claim successfully, and to win the appeal if you get turned down. The best advisers are those that, if they are stumped by your initial benefit inquiry, will look at taking a different tack, and will do a bit of research into the problem to get a solution, and who may identify another benefit issue, and a solution, that you didn't know about.

An example of a bad advice organisation (which I won't name but it operates in North Liverpool and is funded by housing associations): one of their advisers told a tenant that he could not appeal about being refused a benefit because he had missed the time limit by about a week. If the adviser had any gumption she would have wondered if there were exceptions. If she ever bothered to read her welfare rights law handbook, she would have known that late appeals can be, and often are, accepted up to 13 months after the original decision. (13 months being the absolute time limit).

An example of a good adviser - me, and I don't apologise for blowing my own trumpet :- I had a client who wanted help filling in an incapacity benefit form. I did that for him, while asking rather more questions than were strictly necesssary to fill in the form, so I could find out some background to how he had become incapacitated. I discovered he had had an accident at work, so I fixed another appointment for him to claim industrial injuries benefit. I referred him to another organisation for a personal injury claim against the employer. Then I did a general benefit check, because he had a family, to make sure he was claiming everything he was entitled to for them.

The best way to choose a benefit adviser is to get a recommendation from some-one who has already used one, whether a particular person or a particular organisation.

We've put a list of established advice providers in the sidebar on the right. They all have legal aid contracts. But if you don't qualify for legal aid, and they are able to charge you a fee for advice (not all of them can), the cost and what you're going to get for it will be completely transparent. And they definitely won't get you into trouble by telling you to lie to tribunals!

The Child Support Agency should never have been set up. The state simply should not interfere in people's family lives. It's too inflexible and too limited. Matters of child support should be left entirely to the courts, who can look at the circumstances of a family breakdown and make a range of decisions depending on the situation.

All the Child Support Agency (CSA) does is require "parents with care" of children (nearly always women) who claim benefits to become dependent on ex partners by requiring the "absent parent" (ex partner, nearly always a man) to pay a fixed amount of money which amounts to a large chunk of his income.

Some women want nothing more to do with their exes and resent being forced to take money from them, especially when this doesn't make them any better off because their benefits get reduced by the amount of child support. Some have a workable arrangement with their exes that keeps resentment to a minimum (dad might take the kids for holidays, for example, or get them new clothes) and they don't want the state to disturb this. Some absent dads are resentful of being made to lose a chunk of their wages for kids they never get to see, or a relationship that ended badly and for which they blame the woman.

The courts have a mediation service for these sorts of issues. The CSA has naff all except a 'big stick' with which to force absent dads to pay up. The CSA is about saving the state money, period. It has nothing to do with children's welfare.

Some examples I've had this year are: a father who refused to pay his assessed child support because he discovered that mum had become a heroin addict and he suspected that's what she was spending the child support money on. The CSA isn't interested in whether or not she's spending her children's food and clothing money on the brown stuff, it just sent bailiffs after dad for refusing to pay. The CSA does not have the scope to do what the courts could, and set up a trust fund for the children so mum can't spend the money on anything else.

Another man disovered that his wife had been having an affair with his brother since the start of their marriage. He still doesn't believe all the children are his, regardless of the DNA test results. When the CSA came after him for child support, he simply gave up his job and from then on did only short term agency jobs so they couldn't trace him. When the CSA did eventually catch up with him, he refused to give them information about his income even though he knew he'd get fined in court.

A court could have made a clean break settlement which provided for the children while taking the wife's bad behaviour into account. For example, it could have arranged for the family home to be held in trust for the children with any proceeds from its eventual sale going to them, but with the wife not being given any beneficial interest in it. The CSA's rigid procedures have allowed this man to retain bitter resentment for 10 years.

Another one has suddenly been asked to pay 8 years backdated child support, after his ex said she didn't want a penny from him (and didn't want anything to do with him again.) He has since started a new family, and she got a new husband. It was only after this second marriage broke down and she went on benefits that the CSA butted in. It doesn't make any sense for this client to be asked to pay 8 years' backdated child support when their stepfather amply supported them for all of that time. In fact, since he took on parental responsibility for them when he married their mum it might make sense to expect him to keep contributing now. But the CSA is only interested in biological, not actual, parentage. So I get to deal with an irate ex-dad who has been asked to pay £10 x 416 weeks, and explain to the CSA that he can't afford to pay £4,160 at once so would they like to take so much a week? And yes, I know they like to get arrears of child support paid off within 2 years, but this ex dad isn't that well off so they'll have to make it longer.

The CSA are none too good at catching up with changes of circumstances either. I have had to explain to them why an unemployed dad can't carry on paying child support of £67 per week when his Jobseekers Allowance is only £64.50 per week. I had to write them three letters before they worked out that this was a complaint, and agreed to revise his child support assessment.

An unusual situation

I met the client while I was on the housing duty rota in the county court. This is when I get to sit in one of the interview rooms on the day when the court has listed all the rent arrears or mortgage repossession cases, and represent anybody who asks me. Some tenants have already sorted out a payment deal with the landlord beforehand, some haven't.

This particular tenant was unusual in that it was , in effect, his own landlord who had put him in rent arrears. He is a council tenant. He is also employed by the same local authority that he rents his house from. (I won't name the local authority, but it's a medium-sized Lancashire town with a reputation for incompetence.) He was off sick for a month earlier this year, and when he returned to work his employer paid him half pay for two months. This wasn't something they were supposed to do, they told him it was an "accounting error". (It was in fact an unlawful deduction from his wages, for which he can sue them - more of that later). It took them some time to fix the mistake, meanwhile he couldn't pay his rent. And he couldn't pay his bills, and when he got his full wages back he paid off the electricity company first because he rightly figured they would cut off his fuel supply faster than his landlord could evict him. And then he had to pay vet's bills for his dog; not cheap.

His landlord/employer still owes him £200.

He's in a trade union, but his shop steward isn't answering his phone or replying to emails.

This is the same trade union I was in for a while in Liverpool: Unison. All bar one of their union branch officials was a lazy bureaucrat. I sent some-one's request for legal representation to the branch secretary once, and she sat on it for 2 weeks instead of sending it straight on to the union solicitors. No reason except she just couldn't be arsed. It looks like the North Lancashire branch is the same.

I didn't say anything to the tenant, as I still like to promote trade unions as a useful insurance policy against bad employers. But they can be a frigging embarrassment.

The tenant does have to cover the rent arrears, but I had a word with the local authority's housing officer and told him that the tenant could only afford to repay so much a week, was he prepared to agree? And I was going to ask the judge to award costs against the local authority since it was effectively they who had put the tenant in arrears. The housing officer thought about it for a few minutes and then capitulated. But the poor tenant was so embarrassed, because he knows the housing officer, that he scuttled off as soon as he could.

I hope I can get him to come into the office so I can help him get his wages back.

NOTE: If an employer reduces your wages, or makes deductions from them that are not allowed by law and are not written into your contract, this is an unlawful deduction of wages for which you can sue them in the county court. You do not have to resign from your job in order to sue them. If the employer threatens to sack you in these circumstances, this is wrongful dismissal. You can sue them and get compensation for this too.

Get over yourself

I have every sympathy with my clients. I really do. But I hate having middle class ones who are unemployed. Some of them take it as a personal affront and act as though they're the only person in the world it ever happened to.

I had one such this week. He phoned my office at ten to five on Friday - lovely timing - to rant about being unemployed. I had been helping him to sort out a mix up with his mortgage interest claim. If you have a mortgage, and you've been unemployed more than three months, the Department for Work and Pensions will pay your mortgage interest. As long as you fill in the right form in the right way. My client didn't. He is claiming Jobseekers Allowance for his family and he should have filled in the mortgage claim form himself. But because the mortgage is in his wife's name, he got her to fill in the form. Since she has a different surname to him, the DWP couldn't match her to his claim without some searching through their system. Then they had to send him another form to fill in himself. This whole process took about 6 weeks, which is a standard response time for the DWP.

So, the client phoned me up at ten to five on Friday, to rant about the following:

-They were asking him to start his claim all over again
-Why hadn't I told him sooner what the problem was
-Why hadn't the DWP told him sooner what the problem was
-He'd had to borrow money to pay the mortage
-The Jobcentre has told him he might have to take a cleaning job, and he was a manager in his last job
-People who claim benefits for years get treated like royalty, because he's a hardworking person he gets treated like dirt
-His benefits are not enough to live on
-He's going to complain to his MP

Now that I'm working in private practice, I have to take special care to be nice to clients. Working for a big voluntary organisation, like the Citizens Advice Bureau, for example, it matters less if the odd client gets disgruntled. The organisation has a national profile which is not going to be easily dented and will never be short of clients. And it gets local government funding as well as legal aid money. In private practice you have to work harder to get clients and keep them loyal to the firm. You can't afford for them to get disgruntled enough to go to another firm.

So I had to be pleasant to this pillock on the phone and pretend to agree with him. And I couldn't sound off about him to colleagues afterwards. It's considered 'unprofessional' to criticise your clients publicly.

So I'm going to sound off here instead!

What I really would have liked to say to him was:

-Yes, you will have to start your claim again. You can't claim benefits unless the right person fills in the right form with the right information.
-You didn't know why your claim had been held up when you came to see me, so how the fuck would I know until I'd made inquiries of the DWP? And by the way, they've apologised in that last letter, even though it was your mistake, not theirs. They didn't tell you to get your wife to fill in the form, you did that all by yourself
-Everybody has to borrow money at some point if they've been unemployed for a while, and no, benefits are not enough to live on. But what makes you think you're the only person in the world with this problem?
-You're lucky your family will lend you the money for the mortgage. Some people are not in that happy position and they get repossession notices. At least your home is safe.
-The Jobcentre staff probably don't like your snotty attitude any more than I do
-Nobody's too good to mop the floor, including you. If you're signing on you have to be prepared to take a job. That's any job that's offered. Or would you like to keep signing on for a few years so that you too can "get treated like royalty". (And I had to go to interviews for low level jobs when I was unemployed last year, and I didn't suppose I was too good for them.)
-Yeah, fuck off and rant at your MP instead. I've got better things to do. Like, next week, I'm in court for three days with, in this order, an eviction hearing, an anti social behaviour injunction, a Rachman-type landlord who paid some-one to beat up two of his tenants, and a repossession hearing for a woman whose husband ran up lots of debts and then buggered off with another woman, leaving her with no means of paying the mortgage.

-Guess what? You're not the centre of the universe, and you're not the only one with problems consequent on not having enough money.

Of course, I said none of these things to the client. I agreed that he was having a hard time of it, it wasn't fair, and yes he should see his MP, his MP can help him with a complaint against the DWP.

And when the self-centred pillock comes to see me the next time he has a problem, I'll be nice to him again. I need the repeat business.

Municipal spending to encourage spending

The Mule (Manchester newspaper) reports this week that Manchester City Council has decided to give local businesses £600,000 of free marketing. They rightly question why MCC sees fit to subsidise the marketing budgets of the big stores around town (eg Debenhams, Marks and Spencer, T Max, Subway, Somerfields etc) who must surely have their own marketing budgets.

What concerns us is that the aim of marketing is to encourage people to spend more money, and especially at Christmas, to put pressure on them to spend high. As The Mule points out, the pressure to spend at Christmas causes families ultimate misery. We know this well. We get a sudden flood of clients seeking debt advice in January and February after taking out loans they can't afford to pay for Christmas.

If you wanted to be cynical, you could say we shouldn't moan about marketing as it ultimately keeps us in work disentangling people's money problems. Personally, I'd rather not have the stress of trying to negotiate with rapacious lenders who (still, notwithstanding the recession) invite people to borrow recklessly and then pursue them with relentless zeal when they inevitably can't afford to pay up. The usual course of events is, I have to write a fourth or fifth letter to the particular bank or loan company to get so much as an acknowledgement while they are sending ever-nastier debt collection letters direct to the client.

Meanwhile, Oldham Borough Council has also put some of its municipal budget towards encouraging people to spend money in the town centre shops, though it chose to stage a Christmas Parade and then a firework display a week later to draw the crowds into town - presumably in the hope that most of them would spend money while they were there. The parade dispensed with any of the christian and most of the pagan symbols of Christmas and instead was designed to resemble the Disneyland parade - a commercial fantasy.

It did feature Santa Claus on a sleigh pulled by reindeer, but this traditional/pagan Christms symbol didn't quite cut it for everyone. I overheard a parent struggling to explain to a small child why "Rudolf" wasn't pulling the sleigh. The small child had noticed that none of the reindeer had a red nose.

ironic fraud

From time to time, a local firm of solicitors asks me to help them with benefit fraud cases. People who have committed benefit fraud usually would have been entitled to some benefits legitimately, if they had made a correct claim for them. So the solicitors ask me to do an "offsetting calculation". It usually relates to someone who has carried on claiming Jobseekers Allowance or Income Support or Employment Support Allowance while they were working. Such people could usually have legitimately claimed tax credits, if they had bothered to do so when they started work. I work out how much they could have legally claimed in tax credits (and maybe housing benefit) and the solicitors use the figure to offset what they claimed fraudulently. This is to demonstrate that they didn't defraud as much money from the public purse as the prosecution is making out, because they were entitled to claim a certain amount legally. By reducing the amount they have defrauded from the state, the solicitors hope to get them a lighter sentence.

This week I was asked to do a calculation for a single mum who carried on claiming Income Support for more than 6 years while she had a full time job. I can see why she was tempted to commit fraud because the wage for the job is cack. She was never paid above the minimum wage and that's barely enough to support a single person. It simply doesn't feed and clothe a family with three children. But because the wage is so low, she could have claimed almost the same amount in tax credits, legally, as she got from illegal Income Support payments. Her tax credit entitlement over 6 years is only £2,000 less than the Income Support. So in effect the silly moo has risked a criminal conviction (and possibly risked her kids being put into care if she got jailed) for almost no financial gain.

She probably won't get jailed for only defrauding £2,000. She'll just get fined.

I did another offset calculation a couple of months ago, for a woman who carried on claiming Income Support after she got married. Couples can't claim Income Support anyway unless they're both disabled, or too sick to work, or they're both caring full time for a disabled person. None of this applied to the couple in question. And the woman's husband was in full time work, and he was getting somewhat more than the minimum wage. This meant that they were entitled to a relatively small amount of tax credits, and no housing benefit. After doing the offsetting, what she had defrauded in Income Support and housing benefit over 6 years added up to a five figure sum.

She got a year in jail. The solicitors were disappointed. I thought they were being a bit naive: fraud worth tens of thousands? If the judge had only fined her for that, the local paper would have been ranting about the courts letting people get away with fraud. But I probably helped. She could have been sentenced to up to five years.

Last month, I did a reverse referral, I sent a client who initially saw me to the solicitors firm. He came to see me because he wanted to appeal against an overpayment of benefit being recovered from him. He had been claiming incapacity benefit for some years, but had done some work without telling the Department for Work and Pensions. He was well peeved, said the Jobcentre had told him he was allowed to do some work during the first year he was on the sick and he had only been following the rules they said applied. They said he could do 'permitted work' and that was what he'd done.

Ah yes, permitted work. It's true that people who are on the sick can do a small amount of work within certain rules. But they are supposed to tell the Jobcentre before they start so the DWP can make sure it is within the rules.

I read the paperwork the fellow had brought with him. He had done some work, not in the first year he had been on the sick, but in the second year; and the year after that; and a third short term job the year after that. I asked him why he thought these three separate jobs were within the permitted work rules. He claimed the Jobcentre had told him they were and started ranting about them misleading him. But had he told the Jobcentre about them? He said the Jobcentre staff had told him that he could do permitted work when he'd asked about a course which aimed to get people with long term health problems back into work, he couldn't remember when that was exactly; maybe a few years ago. Then he started ranting about them charging him with an offence and he wanted to appeal about that too.

Offence? I looked at the last page, which sure enough was a summons to the magistrates court to answer a benefit fraud charge. Criminal law isn't my field, so I referred him to the local solicitors. They looked at the paperwork, listened to his excuse, and told him his best bet would be to plead guilty so that the magistrates would give him a smaller fine. (He'd get credit for not wasting their time by insisting on a trial when he had no arguable defence.)

The DWP have not cancelled his incapacity benefit, they are only asking him to pay back what he got for the periods when he was doing the three jobs. I wrote to him and explained offsetting, and offered to do a calculation of how much he could have got on tax credits, if he would tell me how much he earned when he was doing each job.

He has not got back to me.

unlawful eviction (1)

It always surprises me that landlords think it's legal to simply change the locks in order to evict a tenant from their home, and even that it's legal to take and throw away their personal possessions. Whenever we challenge landlords who've done this, they always claim they're within their legal rights. My response to them is along the lines of, "I've got news for you - YOU'RE NOT. YOU'VE JUST COMMITTED A CRIMINAL OFFENCE."


I think landlords - and landladies - who are inclined to be vindictive have a sense for which tenants are vulnerable. My latest two unlawfully evicted clients are a self-effacing bloke who just isn't a fighter and doesn't have much self-confidence, and a pregnant woman who moved house to get away from an abusive partner. She went away for a month to look after her mother, who has cancer, and found the locks changed when she returned.

I so despise landlords who do this sort of thing. I wonder how many of them get away with it because their tenants don't know about their rights and don't know where to find out. I was doing a benefit check for a client once, and he happened to mention that he'd been unlawfully evicted the previous year. He was reluctant to do anything about it, even when I told him he could take the landlord to the cleaners for compensation for the loss of his possessions, trespass, injury to feelings. He qualified for legal aid so it would have cost him little or nothing.

The self-effacing bloke took two months to realise he might be able to claim compo for the unlawful eviction. Luckily for him he lives in Oldham. The local authority has an active tenancy relations officer who was able to give him sound information about what he could do. Oldham is prepared to prosecute landlords who do unlawful evictions. The pregnant woman was less lucky. She lives in Salford which does naff all to help unlawfully evicted tenants. They have no tenancy relations officer and only a part time housing advice service, for which you have to turn up and queue up and hope they'll have time to see you that day.

The woman has only recently been evicted, and it's very unlikely that the landlord has been able to relet the property yet, so we can get an injunction through the county court and get her reinstated in her home within days.

But getting compensation takes longer. We've just got a court order for a landlord to pay £15,000 to a tenant he evicted illegally, but it took more than a year. The long-winded nature of court proceedings puts more stress on the tenant. They get justice but it takes too long. I always try to encourage them by telling them the bastard landlord deserves to be dragged to court and made to pay.

The trouble is, some of them aren't angry enough. I told the pregnant woman we could get an injunction and have her back in her home within three days (assuming the landlady isn't stupid enough to disobey a court order). She asked me whether going to court was the right thing to do. "Well, this is how you get your home back," I said, "You told me that's what you want. " "Do I have to go to court?" "Well, yes, if you want to be sure of getting the injunction. The judge might want to ask you a couple of questions." She told me it was 'too soon' and she needed time to get her head round the idea of going to court. So instead of being able to slap the landlady with an injunction within 48 hours of her locking out her tenant, I've had to give her a week's notice that we're taking her to court. Judges do prefer it if you give notice to the person you're taking to court. They consider it more fair. But it will give the landlady time to concoct a story and try to defend the injunction.