Hi - I have a severely autistic son and we were advised to claim Carer's Allowance as I care for him more than 35 hours a week. Having him at a special school is obviously great, but that school doesn't operate a breakfast club or after school club and therefore I'm very limited in the work I could fit around him.
I do have a very occasional gig as someone who runs school study days at my local church (it's a history curriculum thing). I would be very lucky to get more than 6-10 of these a year and in fact most academic years it's more like 5. I get paid around £184 for a day and almost never have had more than one a week (I'd then have a 'famine' with no bookings for months!). I've claimed CA for about 5 years now?
Anyway, my recently arrived CA letter says my weekly allowance is £196 and over that, I would lose it. Given that my fairly meagre earnings, spread over the financial year, would work out VERY much lower than that (!) I'd always assumed this was the way it works.
Is it?? Or would they view it as fraud if I did happen to have one week in the year where I did two study days, even if the following months were entirely barren, earnings-wise?
And if in the past I had done two study days in one week (it has happened) then would they have wanted me to pay back CA for that entire year, or just for that week, or from that week onwards?
I applied for CA before I started doing this very occasional sessional work. It just feels like there's very little point in even doing this (I want to though! It's a sort of lifeline back to when I used to have a career that used my mind). Because there's no magic wand that's going to generate what I get in CA on a weekly basis, there just aren't going to be that many bookings. 