SN Children, personal travel budgets in lieu of a council funded taxi and UC. Advice please.

[TheZoomies]

I have posted in the SN section but also here for relevance.

I have 3 DC with sen; two of them attend special schools (different ones) and I drive them to and from school. I receive a travel budget for each child from our authority.

I also receive UC but after reading the leaflet from my council when I first applied for the travel budgets, it specifically says in there that the budget does not affect any other benefits.

I also did some research in to regulations for UC and found that LA payments were disregarded.

However, it seems that this disregard is only for a period of 12 months. Is this correct?

As the leaflet said that the travel budget does not affect benefits, I declared the bank account it goes in to on the UC claim (which has a £0 balance), but I did not register the travel budget as I understood that it wasn’t classed as income. Now after seeing the 12 month limit, I’m worried I’ve got it wrong.

I pay for the fuel in my car every week to take my DC to school. The travel budget goes in to my other account every month and I transfer it in to the family account where it goes on any bills that come out that week (because I’ve already covered fuel for that week). Is this ok?

I’m not sure if I’m worrying over nothing or if I’ve made a mistake.

Hi not sure if it helps but we get a eml card that our transport budget gets paid into then I transfer and upload petrol receipts etc to the eml account, if yours is similar then there will be a paper trail of the money being "separate". Aldi not sure if your LA is the same but anything left over gets returned so I suppose in that sense it's not an income as only intended to pay for one thing, maybe. Love the username we have a Hound that loves Zoomies