SAVINGS AND BANK BALANCE JUST OVER £6000 BUT IT VARIOUS WEEK TO WEEK

Hi Gordon,

It's interesting to see this keep coming up on here. I have dealt with the DWP a lot over this issue.

Whenever I wrote in to declare capital, I always deducted the benefit income when making the capital calculation.

I'm confident this is correct, I even have a document where a DWP decision maker made a similar calculation but made the mistake in the deduction of using the weekly income figure, rather than the period in which the benefit is paid (e.g. ESA fortnightly).

Fortunately for me, the impact of such a mistake was limited as I never had more than £14k in the my bank account but had I had more than £16k, it would have become much more problematic obviously and needed to be challenged at appeal if necessary.

If I ever do have more than £16k, I'll certainly be referring back to this case in case they try and shut my claim down.

On that last point I made, the following helps clarify things.

‘Income becomes capital if it has not been spent by the end of the assessment period after the one in which it was received’ (Advice for Decision Makers: Capital: H1050).

On the point whether benefit is income, it's certainly not capital anyway so definitely should be disregarded.

it would make life so less stressful if they had an online system like UC, i am on ESA icome related & PIP highest level and to have a journal or diary to report regularly, it would benefit me & all others on these benefits & also the DWP instead of keep sending letters. its 2024 yet the DWP computer system is 50 years behind. They are almost impossible to deal with or even contact

thanks for everyone who has tried to advise me on this matter, its obviously a problem lots of people have with the useless dwp system. Can someone please give me the best action to take, should i call them, which i will be unable to record the conversation or should I write to them. I wrote to them in january asking how often they want me to report it but got no reply. This is causing me so much stress. The balance changes every day, as i have to pay for food etc, my bills come out on different days each month. My only income is from my PIP & ESA, previous messages that have kindly replied say that my benefits should not be classed as capital, but they go into my bank. But if i write to them, by the time they get the letter my bank balance and investments level can change within the hour. I am completely lost as to what action to take. Please help

some shares trade hundreds of millions of times a day, even if you were on the phone to the DWP all the time during office hours you could not update them frequently enough.

the DWP use the average value of shares on one day to set the level, by averaging the days highest and lowest prices.

they don't recalculate every day, it sounds like they do it once a year, if they don't worry about intraday movements in price you probably don't need to either.

you are allowed to spend savings on essentials without this being regarded as deprivation of capital ordinarily, if you bought 1000 tins of beans to get the level of your savings down I imagine they would question that when you show them your receipt, but I imagine there are some things that you could do with buying, maybe you could make a list with prices and buy things now and again if you are worried about the level of your savings, if you bought some stuff and quite by coincidence they hovered around the £5500-£5750 mark for instance that might be less stressful.

As I said, I am self employed and the DWP have agreed to treat my stock trading account as business capital and disregard it while I am trading, so neither of us needs to fiddle about with calculating the value, which yoyo's up and down dramatically, it's possible some kind of permitted work on a self employed basis might give you some relief from this if you were to use some of this capital to start you off saving for business items.