Welfare Rights Bulletin - Issue 279

The handbook provides in-depth information and invaluable guidance on the benefits system and social care services.

Full of tools and tactics to help you make a successful claim.

Your right to benefits

For anyone with an illness, injury or disability
For carers, children and young people
For people in education or work, looking for work, not in work or in retirement
For people injured at work or serving in the Armed Forces
Eligibility requirements and how to make a claim
Challenging decisions; how to appeal

Your right to care and support

The eligibility criteria for people needing care and support
Assessments, budgets and ways of paying for care
Challenging eligibility and funding decisions
Local authority duties
Support for carers

With living costs and unemployment rising, budgets squeezed and problem debt on the increase, no adviser should be without this essential guide to the practice and process of giving money advice in England and Wales.

CPAG’s bestselling Debt Advice Handbook provides the most comprehensive information needed by advisers on the key stages of money advice, including on interviewing clients, establishing liability, prioritising debts, preparing a financial statement, negotiating with creditors and dealing with bailiffs. Emphasis is placed on taking due care of vulnerable clients and making sure that any payment arrangements agreed are appropriate. There is a focus on sustainable credit arrangements that do not affect a client’s abilities to pay essential living expenses and priority debts.

Fully updated to cover all recent changes to legislation, caselaw and court procedure and practice, the Debt Advice Handbook is an indispensable resource for all debt advisers and is fully indexed, for ease of use, and crossreferenced to law, regulations and official guidance, and to court and tribunal decisions. Tactical guidance and examples are included throughout to help you navigate the complexities of the social security system.

Written for claimants and their advisors, CPAG’s annually updated Welfare Benefits and Tax Credits Handbook is the definitive guide to the UK’s social security system..

New in this edition:
- arrangements for the migration of claims for legacy benefits to universal credit
- the latest developments on the right to reside rules for European nationals
- expanded details on the new disability benefits in Scotland

Tactical guidance and examples are included throughout to help you navigate an increasingly complex social security system. The Handbook is also fully indexed and cross-referenced to law, regulations and official guidance as well as to court, tribunal and judicial decisions.

This popular guide to student finance and benefit entitlement in England, Wales and Northern Ireland has been fully updated for the 21/22 academic year, and covers a range of grants and loans available in all three countries - for full-time and part-time students, young people in further education, post graduates and those studying vocational courses.

CPAG’s Benefits for Migrants Handbook has firmly established itself as the leading text on social security entitlement for people who have come to, or who are leaving, the UK. Following the end of the post-Brexit transition period on the 31st December 2020 new rules have taken effect from 1st January 2021, which significantly change the benefit entitlements of migrants. The publication of the 13th edition of this Handbook is timed to ensure advisers get the latest information on these changes.

Ongoing online updates to the Handbook will cover future developments in 2022 and will continue until the publication of Benefits of Migrants Handbook 14th edition, planned in November 2022. The ending of European free movement rights within UK law affects the benefit entitlement of European nationals who began living in the UK before the end of 2020 and those who arrived after, and the family members of both groups. The end of the transition period also affects the benefit entitlements of claimants who move to live in Europe and those who return to the UK after living abroad. The Handbook covers the details of these changes as well as any impacts of the coronavirus pandemic.

Information to help you establish the immigration status of your clients is provided in addition to comprehensive details on the benefit entitlements that result from that status, including specific rules that apply to refugees and others granted leave following an asylum claim. The Handbook is fully indexed and cross-referenced to both UK and European legislation and caselaw.

The online edition gives advisers access to the tool ‘Are you a “person subject to immigration control”?’. This tool enables advisers to establish, through a series of simple questions, if someone falls within this important definition and if so what this means for benefit entitlement.

A separate tool ‘Do you have a right to reside?’ enables advisers to identify whether someone has one or more rights to reside and gives information on whether each right to reside will satisfy that requirement in different benefits.

The Benefits for Migrants Handbook should be on the desk of everyone advising European and non-European nationals living in the UK, and claimants of all nationalities who have recently arrived in the UK or who are going abroad.

This book is free online thanks to a partnership with Barclay's Bank.

Despite struggling to make ends meet, many families do not claim all the financial support to which they are entitled.

This new edition of Financial Help for Families: what you need to know is for you if you work with families and want to help maximise their income or deal with a benefit problem. It covers all the main social security benefits, as well as other important financial support for children, such as child maintenance and help with childcare and school costs. The book would be particularly helpful to advisers working with survivors of domestic violence – with new content prepared with them in mind including the support available to a person leaving an abusive situation.

You don’t have to be a benefits expert – the book is clear and understandable for everyone. It contains plenty of examples to help explain the benefit rules, tactics on what to do if the amount of benefit has been reduced or if payments are delayed and a useful glossary of terms.

The annual Benefits for Students in Scotland Handbook is the most comprehensive guide to benefits and tax credits for students in Scotland.

It includes a quick guide to the grants and loans available for further and higher education in Scotland, and clear, easy-to-use information on students’ benefit entitlement and how this is affected by their student income as well as the introduction of universal credit and new Scottish social security benefits. Also included is information on how benefits are affected in vacations and if a student takes time out from their course.

Fully updated for the 2021/22 academic year, the book is an invaluable resource for anyone who advises students in Scotland. It is fully cross-referenced to the law and includes easy-to-use checklists and examples.

The annual Children’s Handbook Scotland provides a complete guide to the benefits and tax credits that apply when children are living away from their parents, including children in kinship or foster care, children looked after by the local authority, and children at residential school, in residential care or in hospital.

It covers entitlement when children are living away from home, how local authority payments affect carers’ benefits and tax credits, and how to challenge decisions. Fully referenced to legislation and caselaw, and with easy-to-use checklists and examples, this latest edition remains an essential guide for anyone working with families and children in Scotland.

Now in its 19th edition, this Big Book offers 500 pages of user-friendly practical information, tips, tools, tactics, health assessment forms (page by page guidance and tips), effective support letters, caselaw and example appeal submissions.

An essential resource to help make your own claims or support those for others, especially if living with mental health issues.

​New/Updated for 2021/22:​

​Benefit changes: revised and updated overview and charts covering recent pandemic and other changes and a new chapter on the HMRC Emergency Coronavirus Support Schemes.

​Personal Independence Payment: the latest on anti-mental health discrimination, change in assessments processes, case law, and a new approach starting in Scotland later in 2021

​Sickness benefits: Making sense of the sickness benefits scene - what is going and what stays; issues when swapping from income-related ESA to UC, how the ESA/UC Work Capability Assessment works with page by page guidance through an example form, how to effectively support and challenge claims and ESA changes in doing that.

​Universal Credit: now split into two. Part 1: a practical guide to how UC works, moving over to it, claiming, the UC sums, practical tips and pitfalls to avoid in surviving UC. Part 2: separates out more complex and problem areas into their own chapter alongside reports and calls for change.

Published in association with Glasgow Caledonian University SPIRU and WiSE Centre, The Poverty Alliance and I-SPHERE, Heriot-Watt University​

Poverty in Scotland 2021: towards a 2030 without poverty.

Scotland has set statutory targets towards ending child poverty by 2030, and the Scottish government has made wider commitments to eradicating poverty and hunger altogether. Poverty in Scotland 2021 provides a comprehensive but accessible state of the nation assessment of how far the country has come in achieving these goals, and what is now needed to make them a reality.

The book draws on the latest data and evidence to give an overview of the scale, nature and extent of poverty, and the impact it has on people and communities. Chapters explore:

How poverty in Scotland is defined and measured
What causes poverty in Scotland, and whether that poverty is falling
How policies and processes are working to tackle poverty
The extent to which the lived experience of poverty is shaping policy

Over a million of Scotland’s citizens, and nearly one in four of its children, were still living in poverty before the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic struck. This indispensable book brings together contributions from leading experts, academics and practitioners to set out how various policy tools, from public finance, economic development and social care to social security, employment and transport can now be utilised to ensure the ambition of a Scotland free of poverty is realised.

Poverty in Scotland 2021 is the latest in a series providing an essential resource for politicians, policy makers, teachers, community activists, service providers, academics, students and all those working to end poverty.