ESA Award Success, but weekly payments dropped.

Hi this is our first post, but would like to thank Benefits and Work for their excellent guides that have resulted in my husband being migrated from IB to the ESA Support Group - he had to attend a medical, but it seemed to be a formality and was cut short once the nurse confirmed he is in an exempt group. (Recovering from radiotherapy.)

However, we are a bit confused to find that his weekly payment will be going down, despite including a 'Top-up' payment. His Incapacity Benefit included £19.45 a week for our children and we are guessing that this may be part of the problem, however the ESA will be £11.35 less per week.

If anyone has any thoughts that might explain this, we would be grateful.

Thanks in advance.

Duckfoot

Many congratulations on the award and thank you for your comments on the guides.

As far as I am aware there is no reason why your ESA payments would be less than what you were receiving on IB.

The process is to calculate your new ESA payment from scratch and then to compare it with the IB payment, any shortfall should be made up via a Transitional Payment, if this has not happened then you should contact the DWP that dealt with his transfer.

Gordon

Thanks Gordon.

We phoned the Jobcentre Plus today and were put through to the 'IB Migration Team' who told us that my husband's IB included an amount for the children but that the ESA was paid to individuals.

He told us that the money for the children would be made up by increasing our Child Tax Credits and that they were usually informed automatically (hasn't happened in our case) when you were migrated from IB to ESA.

We have been given a 'Top up' payment to make sure that the ESA is the same as the IB for my husband, and will now have to sort out the Tax Credits situation ...