help with housing benefit appeal letter needed

[kaiki]

that's a clumsy title isn't it ?

i am intending to appeal to the hb's recent decison to cut our hb from £109 a week to £55. this includes a £15 per week repayment (which is not the contentious issue)

does anyone have any experience with writing an appeal letter before ? i'm trying to remain succient and clarify all my arguements in the letter but i'm not sure what i need to include, or how best to approach it. what sort of points is it best to include, and what should i steer clear of ?

my main issue is that dp works in a low income job (i am currently not working, dd is 1 year old) but as it is a sales based role his weekly salary fluctuates from vey bare minimum to up to £300 on a good week (this is about once every three months, usually it hovers somewhere around £220). Essentially I want them to take into account an average earning for dp plus all our expenditures, which i don't feel as though they have - they keep tabs on all his payslips on a five weekly basis but because he'd earnt over £300 in one of those weeks they have reduced our future weekly benefit by a third.

i don't feel this is fair, so if anyone has any tips on how best to go about writing an appaela letter, or if you have ever appealled successfully or otherwise i would appreciate any tips please!

p.s sorry if it doesn't make much sense, i have a stinking cold :(

Write a letter to explain circumstances and then just hand in the next five weeks payslips and let them average it again. This happened to me when working part-time on variable hours and they can reassess as you go along. They won't take into account expenditures they are allowed to leave you with the minimum the law says you are required to live on which is roughly £175 for family with a child over the age of one (although will increase for new tax year) per week plus about 20% of the excess money (which just about covered travel to work in my case).

Agree with ZX - I work for benefits dept and when assessing past 5 weeks of wageslips would be fine to work out average income. You have a month to request a review of the decision. Hope you get the right amount sorted soon

thanks for you advice zehnxiang and flabby - i haven't done this before so i wasn't sure what info i needed to include - i don't think it'll help my case to just wang on about how expensive having a baby is, so you're right, i'll just stick to the basic facts and fingers crossed they may consider the cut.