Calderdale DART

💬 Have your say as plans develop for Halifax town centre scheme.

🚦 We're planning changes to bus stops, traffic routing, taxi ranks, cycling and pedestrian zones so that we can improve the town centre for everyone.

Find out more: https://crowd.in/j912nH

BENEFITS AND WORTK NEWS:
ARE TORY MPS’ LESS HELPFUL TO CLAIMANTS?
We recently suggested that readers contact their MP if they can’t get through to the DWP on the phone. We’ve heard from lots of readers since about their positive experiences of asking their MP for help.
One lesson from your feedback seems to be: don’t make assumptions about whether your MP will be helpful based on which party they belong to or what their voting record on benefits is.
So far, we’ve had more positive feedback about Conservative MPs than any other party. This includes the reader who was both “grateful and amazed” at the help they received from their “useless Tory MP”.

BENEFITS AND WORK NEWS:
SCOTTISH CLAIMANTS ALREADY BETTER-OFF THAN ENGLISH
Scottish benefits claimants are £580 better-off than their English and Welsh counterparts because of changes to benefits rules, the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) has found.
The IFS also believes that differences between PIP and the Scottish Adult Disability Payment (ADP) will lead to a higher proportion of claimants in Scotland getting disability benefits in the first place. They will also keep them for longer.
As a result, the difference in income between Scottish and English claimants is likely to grow.

BENEFITS AND WORK NEWS:
DWP USES SECRETS AND LIES TO UNLAWFULLY SN**CH BACK MONEY
The DWP deliberately lied to a claimant about their rights and unlawfully kept legal guidance secret in order to recover an overpayment of over £8,000 which was entirely due to the DWP’s own mistakes.
The High Court has this month prevented the DWP from taking the money back from the mother of two disabled children, but many tens of thousands more claimants may have been hoodwinked in the same way.
One of the grounds on which the claimant appealed was that the DWP had kept secret its detailed policy on when an overpayment should be waived.
The judge held that this secrecy was unlawful.
The DWP also repeatedly lied to the claimant by denying that she had a right to ask them to consider waiving the debt, denials which the judge called ‘manifestly unlawful’.
Evidence in the trial revealed that in the year to March 2021 a total of 337,000 universal credit claimants were asked to repay overpayments whose cause was error by the DWP. The total value of those overpayments was £228 million.
Amazingly, the DWP claims that only 47 claimants asked for their overpayments to be waived in the whole of 2020 and just 7 of those requests were granted.
As the judge commented: “If the claimant’s experience of twice having her request for waiver rebuffed without consideration is not unique to her, the number of requests in fact made may exceed the number recorded . . .”
In fact, many thousands may have requested a waiver and been ignored, whilst many thousands more may have had no idea that they even had the right to ask.