I will receive State Pension shortly and my wife gets Employment Support Allowance (Income-Related and Contributory Related) with a Severe Disability Premium. She is seven years younger than me. We get Housing Benefit and my name is shown as the claimant for Housing Benefit. Does anybody know what will happen when I reach State Pension age in a few months’ time? Will my wife still get her ESA, albeit perhaps at a reduced rate due to my State Pension, and will we have to claim Universal Credit which I hear is less generous than ESA?
Hi Brian & Welcome
You could do a benefits calculator …
https://www.gov.uk/benefits-calculators
Which will give you only a guide - I suggest you make a call the Carers UK help line. Get in touch with us | Carers UK
(I think) your housing benefit will only be effected if you either move properties and/or start a new claim. Which you could be then requested to use UC and you would then get a reduced allowance entitlement/amount. For being a mixed aged couple i.e. one state pension one working age.
A3/2019 Mixed age couples: changes to entitlement conditions from 15 May 2019 - GOV.UK.
Most grateful for the information.
Please can you help me, I have claimed for Attendance Allowance in January and received 1 text message from the DWP which said that they have received my claim on the 10 February 2022 and have not anything since then, it is now 6 weeks gone.
I am claiming as my wife has got Parkinson’s disease.
It takes a while to process, but will be backdated to the date of your original claim.
Usually it takes about 3 months, but I don’t know if that timeline has extended because of Covid.
Yesterday the message on the DWP phone line states there is up to a 12 week processing time.
Are you claiming Attendance Allowance for yourself or for your wife? Or is it Carer’s Allowance you are claiming for looking after your wife?
I claimed Attendance Allowance at the end of January this year. I received the Decision letter on the 8th March 2022 saying that I had been awarded AA. The first payment was actually in my bank account on the previous Friday 4th March 2022.
From what I can gather from posts on different forums there does seem to be a big variation in the timescales for claiming Attendance Allowance.