[2024] UKUT 305 (AAC)

For academic year 2021/22, the Appellant was a full-time second-year undergraduate student at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David. Since the Appellant was resident in Wales, Student Finance Wales, acting for the Welsh Government, were responsible for providing the Appellant with education-related financial assistance. While not stated in the First-tier Tribunal’s papers, the amount of the Appellant’s maintenance grant suggests that she was not living at home while studying.

Student Finance Wales informed the Appellant that her financial support for academic year 2021/22 would consist of:

The Appellant also claimed Universal Credit. The Secretary of State’s Universal Credit decision of 8 October 2021 included an income assessment. This seems to have “automatically disregarded” the Appellant’s Special Support Grant of £5,161 and her Parent’s Learning Allowance of £1,821. The DWP’s First-tier Tribunal submission suggested that the entire amount of the Appellant’s WGLG was included as unearned income and it was this, when added to the actual amount of the Appellant’s student loan, produced a deemed unearned income of £8,289. This was the same amount as the maximum student loan that the Appellant, according to the DWP, could have acquired. The Appellant accepted that her actual maintenance loan of £5,350 fell to be taken into account as ‘student income’ for Universal Credit purposes but disputed that she should be treated as having received any greater amount of student loan income than that.

The above description of the DWP’s decision-making is not framed in definite terms. There is a reason for this. The precise steps taken by the DWP in calculating the Appellant’s income are not entirely clear. The First-tier Tribunal submission is capable of being read as stating that the DWP both treated the Appellant as having the maximum student loan of £8289 and took the entire WGLG account into account. This cannot have happened. The DWP’s final income figure shows that they did one or the other, but not both. Whatever decision-making route was taken the practical destination was the same so far as the Appellant was concerned. The Appellant’s income for Universal Credit purposes exceeded her actual student loan income by £2,939, which was the amount of her WGLG according to Student Finance Wales data. The Appellant appealed to the First-tier Tribunal.