Financial assessment process

If it is decided, following your care needs assessment with a practitioner, that a chargeable service is likely to be required to meet your needs, your practitioner will request a financial assessment for you.

There are some differences in how your charge is calculated depending on whether you are assessed as needing:

• Long Term Residential Services
• Short Term Residential Services
• Non-residential services such as home care or day care

If you are not sure what type of care you will need have to meet your needs, you can ask what your contribution would be for residential or non-residential services.

Check how financial assessments are calculated

All information about your personal financial affairs is treated with the strictest confidence. It is not discussed with anyone else without your prior knowledge and permission. However, the information we have may be used for cross-system and cross-organisation comparison purposes for the prevention and detection of fraud, and for safeguarding purposes.

If you want to pay for the care yourself

You can choose not to receive financial help from us and pay the full cost of your care from your own resources. In this case you may make your own contractual arrangements with the care and support provider.

If the person in care cannot manage their own financial affairs

If the person you're caring for is unable to manage their own financial affairs, you or someone else can be appointed with the proper authority to do it for them.

Understand the different choices to managing affairs for someone else (Citizens Advice)

What happens during an assessment

We will contact you to make an appointment with you. We may decide that a visit is needed, or we may be able to gather the necessary information about your financial circumstances over the telephone.

We will then carry out a fair assessment and calculate what your charge for care and support will be. We will try to do this before you finalise your support plan with your practitioner so that you can make a fully informed decision about how best to meet your needs.

During the call or visit we will ask you a number of questions about your income and capital (both property and money) and your household expenditure.

Ask to have someone present with you

If you wish, you may ask someone else to be present when we arrange to telephone you or visit. Who you ask is up to you, but please make sure you will be comfortable with this person’s presence during a discussion of your personal finances.

What you'll need to provide

Please have all the relevant documents ready for your interview with the Community Finance Officer.

Either at the time of the visit or shortly afterwards, we will need to see all the documents which relate to your financial details and confirm that the information provided is correct.

Your financial assessment cannot be finalised until we have all the necessary documents. If you do not provide all of the required information, it will result in full cost being charged for your care and support.

Such documents might include but not limited to:

• correspondence from the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP)
• details of benefits if paid directly into your bank account
• occupational, works, personal pensions notifications Bank, Building Society, Post office
• savings account passbooks (with up-to-date balances) or recent bank statements
• documents relating to property ownership National Savings Certificates
• documents showing the shares or other financial assets you own
• rent books
• water rates and Council Tax payment details
• any documents relating to Power of Attorney or Court of Protection

Check if you're entitled to benefits to help with costs

We can help put you in contact with the DWP agencies. We will check that the amount of benefit that you are receiving is correct. If the payment is not correct, we can ask the DWP on your behalf to pay what you are entitled to receive.

We can also help you to apply for any other benefits that you may be entitled to which you are not currently receiving. We can ask other agencies to help you with your claim. Claims to the DWP for other benefits must be made within quite a strict timescale otherwise you can lose money.

For people going into short-term residential accommodation, the DWP rules about capital are different from the assessment rules which we must apply, your Community Finance Officer will explain this in more detail to you if it affects you.

When you will get paid after the assessment

Unless your care and support starts as an emergency or under a crisis situation, every attempt will be made to let you know your charge before your care and support package starts, or before you go into a home.

We will use the information collected from you to work out how much you have to pay. We will try to tell you how much you will have to pay during our visit.

We will send you a letter showing how the assessment has been calculated as soon as possible after our visit. This is not always possible as we may need to obtain further information, or you may not have everything available. Sometimes it is difficult to gather all the information necessary to carry out a financial assessment, especially if your financial affairs are quite involved. If this is the case, we will visit you again or contact you by telephone. If information is difficult for you to obtain, you can give authority for us to try to collect it directly.

We include the benefits that you are entitled to from the DWP in calculating how much you must pay. We can confirm the benefits paid to you by the DWP. This can take some time, so the initial financial assessment done may be a provisional assessment, confirmed when information is supplied by the DWP.

How your payments are reviewed

Every year, from April, we must update everyone’s charges to take account of annual changes in circumstances such as increased benefit payments, and changes in regulations such as increased Personal Expenses Allowance.

Also every year on the anniversary of your first assessment, we will contact you in order to get the necessary information to reassess fully your contribution based on your individual circumstances.

If you have a number of short stays in residential accommodation in one year, and your financial circumstances remain the same, you will only be assessed once and that assessed contribution will apply to all your stays.

How to pay for your care

You will be sent a statement for your assessed charge, usually at the end of your short stay or every four weeks (in arrears) for long term residential/nursing care, non-residential services and Direct Payments.

Your statement will say which period the payment is for and statements are sent four weekly until the account is cleared.

Make a payment

If your financial circumstances change, you should let us know straight away.