04.11.2019 - 10.11.2019

Wednesday 06.11.2019

On Wednesday I completed my UC ATLAS work. There were a couple of different types of ATLAS to accept - income updates and terminates.

I had a bit of a complicated one with one of the income updates. The customer didn't qualify for council tax reduction due to the UC income. The CTR claim remains active for 12 months, we accept updated ATLAS usually monthly. After they haven't qualified for 12 months the CTR automatically cancels. 

In this instance the customer hadn't qualified and still didn't qualify but had also moved address. I checked with my senior officer as to whether I should contact the customer and ask her to do a change in circumstances form, even though she isn't in receipt of any CTR, so that I could open the claim at the new address and continue accepting the ATLAS as she may qualify for CTR at some point before it auto cancels at 12 months. 

I was advised to ask her to complete the online change of address form and open the CTR at the new address and calculate it there. Was still non qualifier. 

Wednesday PM - Apprenticeship study day.

Thursday 07.11.2019

On Thursday I spent the day on my normal ATLAS and also went through my tray. There was nothing out of the ordinary in this work. The ATLAS consisted mainly of ESA and PC updates. 

I did take a phone call from a customer extremely upset about a letter she had received about an overpayment and didn't understand why we were asking for this money from her. I had a look through her claim and the overpayment reason. 

It appeared we had paid an overlap of housing benefit when the customer moved. The officer that dealt with the change of address opened the new address as a LHA claim when the customer had actually moved council to council. In such cases an overlap is not payable. 

As it was Local Authority error and the overlap had been paid to the rent account - so the customer had never seen the payment, I did not think that we should be recovering this from the customer. I think it should have been made unrecoverable. 

As I hadn't made the decision, another team had decided to recover it, I didn't want to just make it unrecoverable without discussing with my senior officer first. We discussed this and my senior agreed we should make it unrecoverable as the customer could not have known that she was being overpaid benefit. 

Friday 08.11.2019

On Friday I completed some new work, including change of circumstances and new claims. 

I also did the VEP tasks I needed to do for the week. These were for income increases, which I amended on the claims and recalculated. One of these resulted in an overpayment of benefit.