Available for In-House Bookings either Online or at your own Training Venue.
A Workshop which will look at the key principles of assessing earnings and other income for HB claimants, covering a wide range of issues.
This Workshop is aimed at Officers who assess Housing Benefit cases, Team Leaders, Benefits Advisors, Policy and Appeals staff members (suitable for all levels).
This is a day devoted predominantly to earnings from employment, with shorter sessions on earnings from small businesses (self-employment and company owner/directors) and selected items of income other than earnings.
The session begins by looking at earnings from employment. Most of the discussion when we run this event centres on fluctuating earnings - How should the claimant’s earnings be estimated? When should the estimate be updated and when it should it be left as it is? And especially, should a decision relying on estimated earnings ever be revised or superseded with retrospective effect and, if so, from when? We will look at what the Upper Tribunal has said about fluctuating earnings and offer our suggested approach in several real-life case studies. We invite delegates to submit their own examples in advance of the day so that the tutor can refer to them and share documents during the Workshop (please ensure that any personal details such as name and NINO are removed from your documents before submitting them). Delegates on a recent running of this Workshop wanted to discuss the 2023 NHS pay award – especially how to treat the non-consolidated element of the award and the “tiered cash payment” (a “thank-you” for working under pressure with backlogs of work), and we will look at this as an example.
The HB Regulations allow a lot of room for judgement in cases where the claimant’s earnings fluctuate unpredictably (i.e. no regular or seasonal pattern): Covid-related downturn, zero hours contracts, occasional bonuses, anomalous months with far more/fewer hours than usual, etc. We will suggest best practice for dealing with these cases. Bonuses can be particularly troublesome - To what period should they be attributed, and should they be taken into account retrospectively or prospectively or should they be regarded as a one-off affecting just one week or month? The recent phenomenon of one-off cost of living bonuses awarded by many employers has generated a great deal of debate – some authorities have taken the view that these payments are not income at all. We will look at the merits of each approach by refence to the HB Regulations.
Other issues affecting earnings from employment: The Workshop covers the most common salary sacrifice schemes, including how to interpret payslips where salary sacrifice arrangements are shown. We also deal with childcare disregards and provide a definitive answer to one of the great mysteries of the HB Regulations: Why is there no mention of breakfast clubs/after school clubs where the children are aged under eight? Some earnings disregards rely on the claimant being in remunerative work - We will consider what this means, including how the definition affects school auxiliary staff.
Self-employed earnings and company owner / directors: During a wide-ranging session like this, we cannot provide in-depth coverage of the earnings of small business owners (we offer separate Workshops dedicated to small business owners), but we will briefly look at the key principles including when and how to review self-employed earnings, whether a review should ever be retrospective and how best to utilise data matching with HMRC self-assessment returns. In the case of small company owner/directors, there are lots of different ways in which they can receive an income from their company other than through a conventional salary (especially when taking advantage of multiple tax allowances for different income streams) – we will include a brief guide to these and how to treat them in HB/CTR.
Income other than earnings: The day concludes with an overview of some of the more troublesome and frequently debated items of income other than earnings: rent from tenanted property, payments in respect of people in the claimant’s care (e.g. care leavers and “shared lives” adult placements), student income, and something that is increasingly debated on discussion forums - flexible draw-downs from a pension pot and deferred pensions.
A comprehensive coverage of this important topic presented by Peter Barker.
Topics Covered:
Earnings From Employment:
o Estimating
o Retrospective adjustments
o Income or capital?
o Regular or one-off?
o Attribution to a period
o Example - discussion of 2023 NHS awards
Income From Small Businesses:
Income Other Than Earnings:
o Foster carers
o Special guardians
o Shared lives
o Other temporary respite care provision
o Deferred pensions
o Drawing down money from a pension pot
Contact us for In-House booking information for this topic.
We are always pleased to arrange most of our Workshops, such as this one, for staff from an individual organisation. Please email us with your requirements for details.
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