Disregarding Energy Support Payments

https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2022/743/made

These regs are about disregarding the one-off energy support payments as capital for social care charging purposes. Asides from the impracticalities of working out what someone has spent which bit of their savings on a fuel bill (that might be paid by DD anyway) who are just over the capital limit now, what happens if a local authority decides to count a payment, say £326 on 14th July, as income for that week? I haven’t managed to find anything to instruct LA charging teams not to count these as income. Has anyone seen guidance or regs for that?

I don’t really understand how that would even be in the contemplation of an LA. The fact that the payments are disregarded as capital is reflective of the fact that the payments are capital payments and not income payments. If they were considered to be income, doubtless they would have made regs disregarding them for that purpose. But they are capital payments from first principles due to being one off payments with a lack of regularity. If an LA were absolutely determined to bring them into account then you would just wave s8 Social Security (Additional Payments) Act 2022 at them which gives about as heavy a steer as can be imagined.

Fortunately our council wasn’t considering including them in the charging assessment calculation.

This is useful, thanks Keith. At least we have something definite to stop any LA’s seeking to take these into account in some way or another. We see some real horror shows and were going to raise a PQ to get clarity.