Providing evidence to Student Finance England - 'dormant' account from the 1990s

[tribpot]

I've checked back to make sure there isn't a thread for this for this year yet.

Just applied for student finance with ds and now I need to provide my income details, which means setting up my own account with Student Finance England - but I can't. If I say I haven't ever applied for finance it bombs me out saying my details are too similar to someone else - the other person is me, as I had a small loan in the early 1990s. I'm convinced I finished repaying it later on in the 1990s as well.

So if I answer correctly that I have, I get the message "As you cannot reset your details online please call us on 0300 100 0607".

Based on looking at older threads on Mumsnet I am expecting this to be a pain in the arse when the phone lines open tomorrow, and to need to be able to provide address details of where I was living whilst at uni (not sure if it's my address or my parents' address, probably the latter). Just to add to the fun, the address of my parents' old house has changed quite significantly in the intervening decades - a new postal town has been added to it and I'm pretty sure the postcode has changed as well (not radically but the first part of the postcode has definitely changed).

Just starting this thread really to be able to update it with the experience of sorting this out in 2023. I assume at some point fairly soon this will largely resolve itself, as parents themselves will be young enough to have interacted with their student loan account online, but I'm pretty sure I never did.

They have responded to me! But only to say 'you'll have to call us on this (not free) number'. Rubbish.

Have either of you tried to open a new account? Sounds like my situation was exactly the same as yours and that's what he advised me to do. He did mention the form on the website as an alternative but then just said that I could just create a new account.

That sounds a nightmare. Do you only have to go through this if you are claiming more than the minimum maintenance loan? I am sure I will have the same problem as I graduated in 1994 and did have a relatively small loan which has long been paid off. But I sofa surfed more or less for my final year and would have no idea which of the 3 or 4 addresses I stayed at!

@MrsBennetsPoorNerves Yes, I tried that - said I was already on the system. My surname hasn't changed, though.

Ditto, @MrsBennetsPoorNerves - computer said no. And offered to send new login details to an email address I've never had .

If your DC is only claiming the non means tested portion of the maintenance loan, then there is no need for you to be involved at all. If they go ahead anyway and tick the box which triggers an email to you, if you just ignore the email, after a couple of weeks the assessment will go ahead and allocate just the minimum amount (assuming eligibility, that is).

Is there a site that explains what finance they can get with what parental income? I've a feeling DD will only get the minimum anyway, in which case it seems a lot of pointless palaver. What about tuition fees, is that separate or part of the same application?

The government actually provides a site @Catspyjamas17 and I went through the whole thing and came out the other end still bemused.

The rules are different if you're in England, Wales or Scotland (or I'm sure Northern Ireland but I didn't see anything about NI when I was looking into this). So my answer below only applies if you live in England.

You apply for tuition fees at the same time. These are not means tested, the student just borrows the money or doesn't borrow the money as they (and you) see fit.

The student can apply for half of the full maintenance loan without having to provide any supporting income info. The other half is only available if the household income is low enough. This is SORT OF explained here:
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/student-finance-how-youre-assessed-and-paid/student-finance-how-youre-assessed-and-paid-2022-to-2023

Quick rule of thumb seems to be if the household income is over 50K, don't bother and just apply for the part of the maintenance loan that doesn't require all the palaver that this thread is about.

I will see if I can find the link to the calculator that bafflingly tries to explain this.

Right, here we go. Here's the calculator: https://www.gov.uk/student-finance-calculator

And I've just gone through it again to remind myself why I was so baffled at the end. It doesn't ever explicitly say 'all you're entitled to is the non-means-tested part of the loan'. However, you can deduce this from the fact the amount you can get without means testing (for a student living away from home and outside London) is £4,651. If that's what the calculator comes out with, save your sanity and don't apply for the 'extra' part of the loan.

Thank you!

Love the phrasing on the amounts at the end i the calculation

the amount you might not be eligible for, based on your answers

’might not’ 🙄- clear as mud! What is problem with ‘difference between maximum loan and what you are eligible for’ or even the truth of the matter: ‘amount your parents or carers would be expected to contribute subject to their finances’

It's all so dreadful, I can't believe any of these pages have passed accessibility testing. The content is gibberish and designed to hide the fact parents have to make a fairly significant contribution to their kids' living costs, or else students need to work. Whether you agree with that policy or not, it should just bloody well tell us the truth in plain English.

The Save the Student site has a useful table, showing the 'break points' for students domiciled in England living at home / away outside London/ away studying in London.

https://www.savethestudent.org/student-finance/maintenance-loans.html#amount

Ooh that's definitely the clearest info I've seen, thanks @MarchingFrogs

Resurrecting this thread to rant.

I brought up the points that we've been discussing here on SFE's facebook page and guess what? I've now been selected for a Household Income Check. Willing to bet this isn't random but anyway...

Trying to sign in to my I.R. account to print off my self-assessment details from 21-22, the password is now wrong because I thought all government gateway agencies would use the same logins and changed the password when I was trying to get on to do dd's supporting statement.

So I changed the password, but I'm still not getting any access.

At this point SFE/Gov Gateway feels like the Circumlocution Office in Bleak House.

So I have to wait 2 days for new login details to look at my own tax records, then print them off with about 500 other forms so that SFE can try to gotcha me, presumably.

All for the sake of probably a couple of hundred extra on her maintenance loan. It doesn't seem worth it, and at this point I've thrown in the towel and accepted I'll just have to find the extra from my savings.

I just hate them so much!

Government Gateway as a form of ID was meant to be superseded by GOV.uk Verify, but that seems to have fallen by the wayside (if I had to speculate, because HMRC refused to adopt it). So I suspect what's happened @ZittiEBuoni is you have more than one Government Gateway ID. I've just had a look in my password manager and I reckon I can see about 5 each for me and DH.

Is it worth keeping going so that SFE don't win? How long will the printing out of all the stuff take? (I don't mean in a 'therefore you should do it because it won't take long' kind of way, but more 'your time is valuable, is it worth spending the time to do it'). I am still locked in a dispute with an energy company over an estimated bill from this time last year for a flat we rent out (the latest demand has been triggered by the tenant leaving). It's for £46 when I owe about £2. I truly do not want to pay this energy company 44 quid but there are limits.

Ah, thanks, @tribpot , suspect I was using the wrong password to match my HMRC number. Oh well, will have to wait '2 working days' before I can do anything - so the middle of next week then...

I'm bloody minded enough to just do it all anyway so that SFE don't get the satisfaction of taking some of what dd is due - I think after my initial ire has worn off I probably will.

I have a lot of residual ill-will towards student financing anyway after I had to quit a job in the 90s due to severe illness and they sold my debt (a few hundred quid!) to a firm of bully boy Glasgow bailiffs who proceeded to threaten my parents. My dad wasn't the right person to do this to, as he worked for the police force, ha. So they backed right off. But the day I earned enough again to pay them back, I did it asap and have dreaded having anything to do with them ever since.

DD has now had a email to say:

We haven't received the financial information we need from your parent(s) or partner to help us fully assess your student finance application. We have contacted them separately to ask them to provide what we need.
Please make sure they send this information or you may get less student finance than you are entitled to.
To enable us to reference and manage your customer account, please write your Customer Reference Number on every document you send us.
Further information about student finance is available at ^www.gov.uk/studentfinance^^.^

Yours sincerely
Student Finance England

Firstly, they haven't contacted us, neither of us has had any contact with them yet. Secondly I thought you only had to provide financial details if the household income is <£50,000, as DD will only get the minimum loan if you are above that and we are.

I did start filling in the PFF2, not being able to access the site online and even phoning them to try to get in, but thought I didn't need to provide anything so didn't bother further.

I think what may have happened is that DD2 has opened the portal to hell by ticking the option in the application to say she wants to apply for the means-tested part of the loan. Can she and you go in and have a look and see if she can un tick it?

That sounds likely to me too.
They seem to make the whole system as complicated as possible.
It is particularly unhelpful that they seem to want to keep hidden many students will only get a minimum maintenance loan of about £4300 and parents are expected to make it up to the full one for those from less well off families. They go on and on about you may get "up to" as if they were some kind of advertisement in breach of trading standards. Instead they should right up front say if you earn over £x or your parents do not bother to provide any financial information of parents as you are getting nothing more than the minimum.

In the 1980s when I got the very minimum maintenance grant similarly my parents were expected but not obliged to make it up to the full grant. In a sense we still have a similar situation.

Ah thanks - will ask her to go in and untick.

I got nearly a full grant when I went university in the mid 1990s though it was the time when it was being cut each year and phased out. Parents earned about average salaries or just below and they could only give me a few quid here and there- nothing like what the government thought they should contribute as the calculations didn't take into account a lot of their outgoings. My first loan was £1000. Eventually borrowed about £6.5k over four years. Paid it off just before I had DD1.

According to the link above the household income cut offs are more like 62K outside London and 70K inside London, so still worth looking into if you're around the 50K mark - they'd get almost an additional 2K in means-tested element if the calculations are correct.