ESA timeline confusion - DWP misleading

Hi All,

Wondering if anyone can help me. I've been on ESA Income Support Group for two years. Each time, for one year with having to go through a renewal. I was under the assumption my ESA would run out in February and so was expecting a renewal form of some sort, so I rang the DWP last week to be told my award was actually 2021! Obviously extremely surprised and happy, I asked for some confirmation as I didn't have any correspondence telling me this. The phone adviser said they would ask the benefit centre to send me out a letter stating this.

I received a said letter and many of the details were incorrect... Firstly, it said I was on contribution ESA which is incorrect, and then did say my ESA should run out in Feb 2019. So now I'm unsure on what to do? Do I call back again and tell them this or do I just leave it and see if I continue to get my payments into March 2019?

Any advice would be welcome.

Many thanks,

Matthew

Gordon wrote: Matthew

The problem is that ESA does not have an award length, reassessment dates are set by DWP procedure and can be amended by them as required.

You can give them another call to see if the original date is confirmed or failing that wait until February to see whether you receive an ESA50.

Gordon

I wonder if something strange is happening to ESA WCA dates? If you recall I had phoned up at the end of November 2018 as I had been expecting an ESA50 (WCA date January 2019) and none had arrived. I was told my next WCA date was in fact January 2021 but last week I received an ESA50 and when I phoned up to query why I had received one was told my WCA date is Janaury 2019, that is the date it had originally been. It seems strange that both myself and Matthew have had the 2021 date quoted to us. Hopefully for Mathhew his next WCA really is 2021 but it will be interesting to see if there has been a deferment or if this is some sort of a glitch in the computer system? I'm guessing here but I wonder if when the trigger point for sending out an ESA50 passes without WCA action being automatically tiggered (i.e. production of an ESA50 and a referreal to the assessment provider) the system automatically forwards the WCA date to a further 2 years ahead until someone manually triggers the WCA action, at which point the original WCA date reappears. On my file there were notes on the system which had a trigger date of 05/11/18 for automatic WCA referral (i.e. 2 months before the original WCA date) which presumably then triggered a to-do action which someone eventually got around to doing. Of course it may not have happened like this at all and I've just been unlucky that someone has somehow done a manual intervention. But it will be interesting to see if this happens to Matthew. Fingers crossed it won't.