Hello, I’ll try shorten this as much as possible but when I was pregnant with my son, we had been told that we would most likely be able to claim UC as my partner made a decent wage but I didn’t, so we applied, had our meeting at the job centre and got told our claim was looking “incredibly promising” and we got offered a £500 advance, with a baby on the way, we said yes to this and planned to pay it back from our UC payments but these never came through as we weren’t successful with our claim.
We called and asked whoever we could about this and we were reassured that it was most likely because my partner had a mortgage on his house and that we would definitely be successful once our son was here so once he was born, we tried again, same thing, another promising claim, another £500 advance and another “no” to UC. That then left us with £1,000 to pay back and we never did, purely out of absolute frustration because the only reason we took the advances was because we had “promising claims”.
Fast forward to today and my partner has just received a letter about DEA deductions. We are obviously going to pay this back but it just seems absolutely ridiculous that they’d throw money at us twice for us to be denied twice. Surely their system only tells them to give advances to people who’re going to be successful with their claim or is this their way of kicking people when they’re already down?
Me & my partner are very lucky to be in a better position now a days (our son is now two) but we can’t help but imagine how much this must ruin people who’re already really struggling financially.
Has anyone had this same experience? Did you have to pay the money back or did you find a way out of it?