Good afternoon

One of my landlord clients recently asked DWP to correct an error in a tenant’s housing costs. DWP wrongly applied a non-dependant deduction of around £96.55 per calendar month, even though the tenant received the daily living component of PIP and was therefore entitled to have the usual deduction waived in respect of her 27-year-old son, who worked full-time. The PIP award had been reported to Universal Credit nearly two years earlier. After several exchanges, DWP accepted its mistake and paid the resulting underpayment for the full two-year period.

The distinction between backdating and revision remains critical in Universal Credit (UC) advice and support. Backdating concerns a new claim and asks whether the award can begin before the date on which the claim was made. Revision concerns an existing award and asks whether an earlier decision can be changed because it contained an omission or error.

  1. Backdating:

Backdating applies to new claims where the claimant requests their claim be awarded from a date earlier than the date on which they submitted the claim.

  • The Rule: The claimant must show that, throughout the period for which backdating is requested, they could not reasonably have been expected to make the claim because one of the prescribed grounds applied.
  • Key Grounds:
    • Severe illness or disability that physically prevented claiming.
    • Official system failures (e.g., the UC website was down).
    • Lack of notification that a previous benefit (like JSA or ESA) was ending.
  • Example: A single person is hospitalised for three weeks and cannot access a computer. They claim UC, for the first time, on the day they are discharged. They can request backdating for that period because their illness prevented the claim.
  1. Revision or Fixing a Mistake

A request to revise an existing Universal Credit decision can usually be made through the claimant’s journal. If the claimant is challenging a notified decision, the request may also be treated as a request for mandatory reconsideration. The issue is whether the decision maker reached the wrong conclusion, for example by overlooking or misinterpreting material evidence.

  • Time Limit: A challenge should normally be made within one month of the date on which the decision was notified. A late request may be accepted within a further 12 months if the relevant conditions are met. Where the decision arose from official error, however, it may be revised for longer periods once the error is identified as Official error.
  • The Rule: If a decision maker overlooked information that the claimant had already provided, the decision may be corrected from the date of the original incorrect decision. Where the mistake amounts to official error, the decision may be revised retrospectively even after the usual time limits have expired. One example, involving 16 months, can be found here.
  • A further example involved Albyn HA, which helped one of its tenants recover a substantial underpayment of housing costs after DWP failed to act on annual rent notifications submitted by the Association. The case illustrates how an existing award can be corrected when DWP has failed to use information already provided. This type of exmple  is very relevant to the yearly annual increase in rents applying to Social sector tenants where DWP wrongly insists on claimants notifying changes to rent charges but only after the event, when the UC regualtions anticipate the change being made during the tenant’s Benefit Assessment Period.
  • More recently, I highlighted the Downs claimant’s case, involving a resident who had missed out on the Severe Disability Premium. DWP agreed to revise the resident’s income-related ESA award to include the missing premium from Crucially, DWP accepted that the omission amounted to official error, as argued in the earlier bulletin, resulting in arrears of around £33,000.
  • In that same case, the ESA revision then prompted a review of the resident’s Universal Credit award. Because the claimant should have been treated as receiving SDP immediately before moving to UC. DWP also revised the UC award to include a transitional element of £305 per calendar month. The revised entitlement was applied from the start of the UC claim, around one year earlier, and produced arrears of a further £3,000.

A useful first question is: does the claimant want an award to begin before the date of a new claim, or do they want an existing decision corrected from an earlier date? The answer will usually indicate whether the issue is backdating or revision.

I hope this clarifies the distinction and helps you identify the correct route. If you are unsure whether a case involves backdating or revision, please email bill@ucadvice.co.uk or phone 07733 080 389.