Important PSA for disabled students on ESA & UC

Important context: https://www.disabilityrightsuk.org/resources/student-faqs
*sorry in advance if this is hard to understand, I have communication issues but hope this will still be helpful*

So I'm disabled (on PIP and ESA), and am able to receive the extra maintance loan due to my low income. If you read the link above, the extra maintance loan is not counted as income when you're on ESA or UC, only the normal amount is (which is around £4,000). Today I recieved the entitlement letter from student finance telling me the full total of my maintance loan amount, with absolutely no breakdown on how much is normal maintance and how much is extra. This lack of breakdown, from what I gathered from when I called student finance, is a new thing (but correct me if I'm wrong).

It is really important to have written proof of this breakdown when telling the DWP about your maintance loan. If you tell the DWP your maintance amount with the extra included, then they will count the entire thing as income (and typically will stop your ESA/UC as it'll be too high), which is not right. But now that student finance has removed the written breakdown of the maintance, you no longer have proof to tell the DWP otherwise. I called ESA to confirm that this is what will happen.

Solution: I called student finance and explained everything (but it was difficult and I had to do it twice and was passed around a lot), and one of them finally told me they'll send out a letter to me with a breakdown of the maintance loan so I can send it to the DWP as proof.

Obviously every circumstance is going to be slightly different and it seems what you're told on the phone depends on who answers, but I felt this was important to share and hope that it helps anyone in a similar situation. If I need to make anything clearer, let me know and I'll do my best to explain.

Reply 1

Chezer1483

So can you still get UC with the full amount of maintenance loan you’re getting? What about bursary ect?

Reply 2

Scycat

Original post by Chezer1483

So can you still get UC with the full amount of maintenance loan you’re getting? What about bursary ect?

Yes so long as you're on a disability benefit (PIP, DLA etc), you can still receive UC as a student even with the higher maintance loan. But you'll now need to ask student finance for a written breakdown of your maintance loan specifically showing that the normal maintance and extra/higher maintance are separate from each other. Then DWP will only count the normal maintance as income and disregard the extra/higher maintance. This way your UC will only be reduced based on the smaller/normal maintance, as it should, and not stopped completely. I hope that makes sense.

As for bursary and DSA, they won't count as income at all, and you don't need to tell the DWP about those.