Welfare benefits

Most psychiatric patients, including those subject to a hospital order, are entitled to receive welfare benefits. But patients who, were it not for their illness, would be serving a term of imprisonment, do not receive any welfare benefits: domestic and ECtHR challenges to this situation by s47/49 and s45A patients have been unsuccessful, the final judgment being SS v UK 40356/10 54466/10 [2015] ECHR 520.

Patients not entitled to welfare benefits may be paid "pocket money" under MHA 1983 s122 (in Wales) or the National Health Service Act 2006 (in England): see R (Mitocariu) v Central and North West London NHS Foundation Trust [2018] EWHC 126 (Admin).

The rule providing that payment of Disability Living Allowance to an adult is suspended after 28 days in an NHS hospital (the aim being to prevent duplication of public funding to meet the same purpose) was challenged in MOC v SSWP [2022] EWCA Civ 1 but the Court of Appeal decided that it did not breach the patient's rights under Article 14 read with A1P1 ECHR.

Legislation

The following is related to this subject area.

Cases

The following is an automatically-generated list of the pages in Category:Welfare benefits cases:

External links

Lords Hansard 23/6/10: Written answers (Internet Archive). The question was: "To ask Her Majesty’s Government whether long-stay in-patients in psychiatric hospitals are entitled to the same social security benefits as persons not in hospital." The initial part of the answer was: "Psychiatric patients who, were it not for their illness, would be serving a term of imprisonment, cannot receive Department for Work and Pensions benefits."

INFORMATION




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