Welfare Benefits and Tax Credits Handbook 2021/22

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.

The Welfare Rights Bulletin is CPAG's journal of welfare benefits and tax credits law and practice. It is also an updating service for our Welfare Benefits and Tax Credits Handbook.

In this issue:

- newly recognised refugees and claims for retrospective child tax credits
- the DWP’s new Risk Review Team
- when a disabled student may – or may not – be entitled to universal credit
- PIP: digital forms and online claims

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.

The journal aims to stimulate debate about the nature, causes and consequences of child poverty in the UK, and potential solutions.

Inside this issue:

- CPAG's Your Work, Your Way research project
- Universal credit crunch: entitlements, disregards and tapers
- Digitalisation and rights in universal credit
- Social security in Scotland
- The poverties - is there any merit in looking at different poverties?

The Welfare Rights Bulletin is CPAG's journal of welfare benefits and tax credits law and practice. It is also an updating service for our Welfare Benefits and Tax Credits Handbook.

In this issue:

- Should I stay or should I go? Moving to UC
- Erode to nowhere
- Reverification of universal credit awards
- Pre-settled – still unsettled?

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.

The Welfare Rights Bulletin is CPAG's journal of welfare benefits and tax credits law and practice. It is also an updating service for our Welfare Benefits and Tax Credits Handbook.

In this issue:

-UC: escaping the benefit cap and pay cycles
-‘Substantial risk’ and the WCA
-Hard times: UC hardship payments explained
-Right to reside: stuck behind Fratila! What now?

The Welfare Rights Bulletin is CPAG's journal of welfare benefits and tax credits law and practice. It is also an updating service for our Welfare Benefits and Tax Credits Handbook.