Welfare Benefits

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We work very closely with the most disadvantaged and vulnerable members of society and we are seeing more clients now than we ever have before.  They include single parents on low income, parents struggling to cope with the long term sickness of a child or those with a disability.

 

Our work involves helping clients to claim their correct benefit entitlements. It covers initial advice on entitlement, assistance in ensuring benefits and tax credits awarded are paid and challenging wrong decisions, which unfortunately are plentiful.

 

The current tax credit system results in us challenging incorrect decisions covering payment of Working Tax Credit, Child Tax Credit and Pension Credit. Rather than helping working families and pensioners to increase their disposable income, the scheme has been seriously damaged by administrative and structural problems within Revenue and Customs (HMRC). There are processing errors, communication and accessibility issues, excessive numbers of overpayments, and facilities for dealing with complaints and appeals that are quite frankly, inadequate to say the least.

A lot of our work involves helping clients with problems concerning tax credits, and in particular recovery of tax credit overpayments. The approach of the HMRC to recovery of overpayments has caused great hardship to some of the poorest families, and the complexities of the scheme make challenges to the HMRC difficult. This has been the pattern since April 2006 and it looks likely to continue.

 

Our work includes helping claimants access their entitlement to disability related benefits, which means in real terms that we spend a lot of time challenging poor decision-making by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) relating to these benefits. The Law Centre has a very high success rate in appealing these poor decisions. However, an appeal can often take several months to be processed, and in the meantime the clients and their family continue to suffer financially.

 

Looking to the future, the introduction of fixed fees threatens to undermine the quality of benefits work and has the potential to devalue the positive outcomes achieved for vulnerable claimants. The majority of our casework involves tribunal appeals against DWP decisions and as we are now paid hourly rates for our case work, we are extremely concerned that if the quality of decision-making by the DWP and other public bodies is not improved, the Law Centre will be under pressure to reduce costs by cutting down on the time it can afford to spend on such cases.