You can get help if you’re affected by:
- a mental health condition or learning disability
- a condition affecting cognition (such as autism)
- drug or alcohol dependency
- complex needs due to personal circumstances (such as literacy or communication difficulties) or a life event
Many people struggle with the benefits system with all its complicated rules and processes. When these go wrong, it can leave some people in hardship, struggling to cope and in difficult financial situations.
There are special rules within the benefits system to help protect people with health conditions or complex needs. These rules or safeguards help make the process easier to manage.
A safeguarding alert informs benefit teams of circumstances which may affect your ability to manage your benefits. These rules should be observed before suspending your benefit payments.
What you can do
You can create a safeguarding alert. This will make sure that:
- the relevant benefit teams, including the council and Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), know about your health conditions or situation. This means the departments can make adjustments or put in place extra protections for you
- your support worker or other appropriate person named on the alert is notified of any problems with claims
- organisations can share information about you
The benefits safeguarding alert is only recognised by Royal Borough of Greenwich and Woolwich Jobcentre (JCP). Other councils may not use this alert.
What we will do
We take extra steps when someone has a safeguarding alert.
- We will contact you before suspending or terminating your benefits and attempt to contact the third party where possible.
- The Council Tax team will make every effort to contact you to arrange repayments if you owe money to the council and seek to avoid the use of enforcement agents where possible.
- JCP will make every effort to contact you or a third party if you miss an appointment to establish why and take the benefit safeguarding alert into account with your claimant commitment.
- The JCP will also take the benefit safeguarding alert into account in your Universal Credit claimant commitment.
Case study
John has been on Universal Credit (UC) and has a benefits safeguarding alert on his claim. This includes details of his support worker.
He missed an appointment he was scheduled to attend at Woolwich Jobcentre. His work coach was able to contact his support worker to check if there was a reason why John had missed his appointment. His support worker explained that he had been admitted to hospital.
This helped to prevent a sanction being applied to his UC claim.
Fill in a safeguarding alert form
Download and print your safeguarding alert form.
Try to complete all sections of the form and return it to:
Greenwich Welfare Rights Service
Second floor, The Woolwich Centre
35 Wellington Street
London SE18 6HQ
We'll share the alert with other council departments, the DWP and JCP.
Your data and protection
We store benefit safeguarding alerts on our Benefits system. We only send them to other council departments once it’s been agreed.
The DWP will record the safeguarding alert on your benefit claim.
You can contact us to remove the alert from the system at any time. We’ll then contact the relevant departments to remove the alert.
If you want the safeguarding alert to be removed from your DWP claim, you can also contact the Jobcentre directly.
The alert will stay on your claim record for as long as it is live or open. If your benefit claim ends, you may need to complete another alert.