To think I won't survive on £48 pcm !

[Thegardenismine]

Long story short I've just become single 😀I've many a thread on here under a couple of user names over the last few years and you've helped me get through a really bad period with H. Thank you.

I was actually preparing to leave as the control and EA was getting so much worse. I need to do the Freedom Program. My plan was to attend the council as homeless.

But !!! He left on Sunday saying he was fed up went depression and I was an embarrassment. He's moved in with his Plan B.

So I applied for universal credit etc and met with a really helpful person at the job centre. It seems I'm entitled to £848 a month. But that includes my rent . Great except my rent is £800 pcm.

What do I do ? If I can't pay my rent I'll be intentionally homeless I expect so they won't help me ?

What are my options. My GP has said I'm unfit for work. Thanks to the H I've no family support. I'm not sure which way to turn. £48 won't cover the water gas electric etc.

I was so relieved when he left but now it's a hot mess !!

@wellthisisshit Did your ESA claim start before April 17? The LCW component was abolished for new claims starting after April 2017.

But you're absolutely right about JCP staff giving wrong information. They have been appallingly badly trained and, tbh, the staff at DWP benefit centres aren't much better. I had to quote their own "decision maker's guidance" manual to one the other day, and even though the guidance was perfectly clear, she decided to refer the matter to the complex case unit.

Go here: fightback4justice.co.uk
There’s a phone number too, for instant answers!
Good luck xx

I've now checked about over 55s housing. My local council doesn't offer this. It's outsourced to other companies

Depending where you live this will probably mean housing associations. In the city I live in, a lot of these advertise via sites like RightMove and Zoopla. Ask the council for a list, or try Googling. Then contact them and ask if they can help.

A friend was in a very similar situation at the end of last year, and was able to find somewhere secure and fairly cheap this way.

Also, OP, I know you said you don't want to contact your children, and I can understand your reservations, but they will probably be so pleased you aren't with that man anymore and would want to help.

Op please speak to your LL, l assume you privately rent? if so they may well allow you to sublet....
I am a LL and a long tern tenant of mine had job issues, salary halved, so rather than lose her l altered her tenancy agreement, so that she could sub let her 2nd bedroom amd bathroom. She found a weekday lodger which covered 2/3rds of the rent. I also was able to reduce her rent for 4 months by 20% to give her time to get back on her feet.
Assuming you have been there a long time and been a good tenant, most sensible LL will see the benefit of letting you sublet.
Offer to let them vet the new tenant before saying yes.

This may also help your MH, try and find a female for safety reasons.

Can you work from home? Posters on the £10 a day thread are earning up to £600 a month from working at home.

@LakieLady this is where I’m confused with the info on this thread, as I first was referred to be assessed for incapacity for work in Jan 2018, when I applied for universal credit for the first time too.
Before that I was living off my savings, as I’d finally had to stop working in March 2027, due to ill health, before that I had been working for 20 years.

From that Jan 2018 I then met with lots of confused information but at no point was I told it had been stopped, it was just whether it existed or not in the first place!

So I’m not sure what went on there, as I said, it was pretty shocking behaviour from the work coach and her manager, which started as their internal targets to reduce referrals to capacity for work, and a general culture of intolerance towards disability, which apparently was done on purpose. So although I’m bed bound and extremely ill, reliant on carers, I was put in the ‘actively seeking work group’ but they did interviews by phone, & refused to countenance moving groups or referring me for this capability for work Assessment (& cancelled it when others in the system did refer me). This carried on for 9 months, and it descended into outright harassment by the end. The work coach in particular got so blatant that she didn’t even attempt to follow process, or try and cover up what they were doing, so they actually documented their own harassment and intimidation, rather foolishly. Like threatening to sanction me if asked to be referred one more time. Or threatening to make me do Workfare / shelf stacking in Sainsbury’s (which would have life threatening consequences for me). At one point she sent a benefits officer around to my home as she’d fabricated a ‘change in circumstances’ accusation, and said I hadn’t attended phone appointments for weeks and she thought I’d ‘got better and was working again’. As she’d spoken to me the day before and recorded it in the online journal, she was a bit of an idiot! And you don’t ‘get better’ from what I have, I’m not ruddy Lazarus, ffs.

So when my GP and a friend both complained and got people further up the food chain involved, I was suddenly awarded the premium and it was back dated some months... now I’m wondering why?!

Maybe in some areas they phased it out more slowly?

Or, Well, if it was to shut me up I’m afraid it worked, as I’ve just thought it was the process finally working, and I was too ill and too ruddy grateful not to have them being horrible to me anymore ...

"met with a really helpful person at the job centre" tends to be an oxymoron!

They are NOT on your side, their job is to keep payouts to a minimum.

Where are you roughly?

Have you checked online calculators?

https://www.entitledto.co.uk

https://www.turn2us.org.uk

They do tend to over estimate slightly but they do tell you which benefits/elements of uc you would likely be entitled to.

Have you arranged your council tax single person discount?

If it's just you you're not entitled to a 2 bed property.

While I sympathise and admire you for moving on re ex I think you need to be realistic.

You need to find affordable accommodation as in accommodation covered by what you're entitled to on your local housing allowance level, even if that means moving slightly out of area. You say you've no support anyway and no job so what's tying you to your current area?

Renting out spare room would probably be against your tenancy agreement, on legacy benefits you only get to keep £20 per week of any money from a lodger plus in your case even that would likely would annul your council tax discount which would likely mean you were worse off. On UC you keep the money but the "bedroom tax" would still apply

https://www.homeprotect.co.uk/lodgers-insurance/taking-in-a-lodger

"The reason I can't work is to do with mental rather than physical health." Mental v physical health isn't the issue, it's how it impacts you on a daily basis. And I'm afraid it's not just up to your dr any more few Drs are really conversant with how it works now.

You need expert mental health claim support

If you're in England and Wales there's "mind" who can signpost you to local agencies that can support and help.

Personally I've not find cab particularly helpful.

Most local councils have a "welfare support service" who help claimants, I've found they're most up to date on the rules.

DO NOT attempt to complete the forms yourself OR with dwp alone.
They're a nightmare to navigate and a mistake can cost dearly.

Find out if your area is legacy (old) benefits in which case you would likely be eligible to claim ESA (employment and support allowance), housing benefit, council tax benefit OR universal credit (but you may still be eligible to make a claim new style ESA) but you would be eligible for various elements in addition to the basic because of your ill health.

Pip is a non means tested benefit to cover the additional costs incurred by your illness/disability. It's separate to the benefits in the previous paragraph.

It's complicated!

Which is WHY you MUST get EXPERT support to claim.

"you are unlikely to get PIP because that is based on what help you need from other people to do various things." Rubbish! If you don't know what you're talking about then say nowt!

"Then, even if you do find a place, you'll need to pay the agent's fees, a deposit and the first month's rent (as benefits are paid in arrears AFAIK.)" not everywhere works like this and from next month fees are illegal.

It is hard finding landlords willing to take benefits recipients but not impossible, there's also social housing - I've found shelter very helpful at times op

"My local council doesn't offer this. It's outsourced to other companies" doesn't mean you can't apply, most social housing is through housing associations rather than councils now. Different HA's have different processes, mine has a "points" system.

JemimaPDuck please do tell if these countries where the sick are forced to work - what happens to those who can't?!

"and I would second going to CAB as they should have the most up-to-date information on what you can do or expect with benefits." 😂 sorry but my experience and that of those I'm close to has been that's far from true!

Goose1964 are you in England and Wales? Rules are different in Scotland because council tax includes water rates which everyone has to pay. Also depends on the household income - if there's a working adult in the house then council tax still chargeable.

"The reason I’m trying to clarify it for you here is that I found the UC people and job coaches gave me a lot of wrong information about the Limited Capacity to Work benefit premium, and it was really difficult to claim because I kept being told it didn’t even exist! I was also told I couldn’t claim it as it was the same as PiP, or that I should claim Pip instead as I was ‘only on DLA’ (utter nonsense!) and basically, it was an utter chaotic nightmare" doesn't surprise me in the least! It's shocking the "advice" they're getting away with giving!

"but I’m afraid one of the people did deliberately do this, and admitted she had been told to stop as many people as possible getting referred on to the Capacity to work assessment" doesn't surprise me either. Then there's all the lying assessors are doing!

In summary:

Speak to

Welfare support service at council
Shelter
Mind

DON'T try and complete the benefits forms yourself

Get on social housing waiting lists ASAP

Contact your children - I'm sure as soon as you explain they'll want to help, they may even have suspected/known anyway but couldn't help until you were ready to get out of the situation.

You are in a tough spot no doubt but you do have options.

Dragongirl wouldn't the OP's H have to agree to that too? I'm not sure he would.

Fairenuff.... As the DH has left and op has no means of paying her rent currently, she will no doubt be evicted if she does nothing re her LL,
so it is better to at least try and see if she has a chance of changing her tenancy,removing Dh and getting a sharer, she has nothing to lose.

The LL is far more likely to want a solution to what he/she will see as a major nuisance which will be expensive and disruptive, and few people would wish someone in her position to be made homeless if a solution can be found that suits both parties.

Honesty is the best policy, followed by a sensible plan as to how subletting can achieve the rent the LL needs, and the op gets to stay in her home.
Op please give this some calm thought, write down what you want to say and try and speak to your LL direct. If you were my tenant l would be happy to work with you to sort this. I am not the only one.

@WellThisIsShit Your work coach should have been disciplined for that!

Their training in UC has been woefully inadequate. A lot of them are still in the JSA mindset where there emphasis has been on getting people into work and sanctioning them at every opportunity. Most work coaches have next to no experience in dealing with people with health issues and it really shows.

Add in to all that the unholy mess that is UC, with regulations that appear to contradict decision maker's guidance and a near total lack of clarity about loads of stuff, and it's no wonder that a lot of them don't what they're doing.

There has been total confusion about the issuing of the UC50. Some people get them really quickly, some people wait ages, some people never get them. Other colleagues advise new claimants to request them.

I short circuit the process now that I have discovered they're downloadable, and just priont them off, fill them in with the client, and send the completed form off to the assessment centre. It's too soon to tell if this actually works, however!

Your experience sound horrific and I hope the staff member was put right about her attitude.

We have quarterly meetings with the regional UC implementation managers, and raise stuff like this with them. It often results in training issues being identified and things are slowly improving in the south-east.

In fairness, I should also add that some JCP staff have really risen to the occasion and have acted with a lot of flexibility and sensitivity. They have been particularly sensitive with a couple of clients with severe MH problems and not required them to attend the job centre at all, so it's not all bad.

Anyone who experiences this sort of dreadful treatment should make a formal complaint imo, otherwise it will just carry on.