General Provisions for Income-Related Benefits

Abstract

For income-related (or means-tested) benefits, both the income and capital of the claimant, along with any income or capital of other members of his/her ‘family’, are used to determine whether the claimant’s means fall below the prescribed level in order to be eligible for benefit. One important feature of the main income-related benefits of the British social security system, such as income-based jobseeker’s allowance, income support (IS), housing benefit (HB), council tax benefit (CTB), working families tax credit (WFTC) and disabled person’s tax credit (DPTC), is that the same standard means test, albeit with some variations, is used to establish eligibility for all of these benefits. Prior to 1988, this was not the case. One of the consequences of the major review of social security in the mid-1980s initiated by Norman Fowler, then Secretary of State for Social Security, was the call for restructuring of the various means-tested benefits. There were over 50 means-based benefits and associated forms of government assistance, which had evolved on a piecemeal basis, resulting in a wide variety of different and differing means tests. This created a highly complex patchwork of different means tests where eligibility varied considerably, which was both confusing and somewhat arbitrary to claimants. The Social Security Act 1986, which replaced supplementary benefit with income support, also established common rules of entitlement for the main means-tested benefits.