Course objectives

• To offer a focus on the radical changes being made to the benefit system.
• To provide experienced practitioners with a detailed understanding of these changes and their implementation.
• To provide an opportunity to discuss the potential impact on clients, service users and practitioners’ own organisations, and to consider options for alleviating the effects of these changes.

Course includes

• Housing Benefit: details of the latest changes to legislation and guidance, including extension of the LHA shared accommodation rate to under 35s, transitional protection from LHA caps for existing claimants, DHP Good Practice guidelines, introducing a size criteria for social sector tenants and more.
• Employment Support Allowance: the roll out of ESA for claimants on incapacity benefits, revising the work capability assessment and time-limiting ESA. 
• Social Fund: recent changes to crisis loans and community care grants and the future of discretionary social fund payments.
• Tax Credits: impact of changes to childcare costs, backdating and income disregards, and what’s changing next year.
• Disability Living Allowance: discussion on the new assessment for the Personal Independent Payment which replaces DLA in 2013.
• Universal Credit: Universal Credit will replace income support, income-based JSA, income-related ESA, tax credits, housing benefit and council tax benefit. We will look at how the new benefit will work and the likely effects on different categories of claimants.
• Notable case law developments/judgements and their implications for claimants.

Learning outcomes

After this course, you will be able to:

• assess what changes have been made to benefit regulations, policy and administration and how they impact on claimants 
• understand what notable case law, judgments and European rulings have taken place 
• identify future planned changes to the benefit system.

Suitable for

This is an advanced course for experienced advisers who want to ensure they are up-to-date with changes and/or to satisfy an annual CPD requirement. Anyone who needs to refresh their knowledge of established benefit rules, or who has not attended welfare benefits training for some time, should attend our Welfare Benefits: Refresher course.

Enquiry line

Please call 0344 515 1155 or email training@shelter.org.uk

In-house training

We can also run this course in-house. Find out more about in-house training