What grants can I get on PIP?

People ask this question but we are not aware of any grants that are automatically triggered by having a PIP award. Having an award will however help to unlock money from a variety of sources. It is not something that we involve ourselves in directly but there is much to be said for investigating the huge number of charities, large and small.

For example, most of the water authorities have charitable bodies attached to them. I used to provide money advice, a very long time ago, and secured significant sums for clients to help with, or to clear their arrears. The same goes for energy providers, but these must be under huge pressure these days. The relevance of PIP, and possibly of a sickness benefit too, is that providing confirmation of these will be persuasive to a charity. They would be entitled to ask themselves why there is no award of PIP, or child DLA, if the medical problems are as bad as claimed.

Search online for ‘charitable grants’ and you will find sites that will do much of the leg work for you. There are over 160,000 charities in the UK. Some are set up to help people with specific medical problems, disability or illness, whereas others are local to a particular area and this is why some sites will ask you to provide a post code. There is something to be said for an approach to such a charity coming from a support worker, a social worker, a community psychiatric nurse or a money advice worker, but if these do not exist, then all you have to risk is the cost of a stamp.

Such grants are not there to provide a regular source of income but can help with a particular one-off payment. You, or one of your dependents might have an emergency or be faced with some unplanned expense that your budget cannot cope with. Perhaps your cooker or washing machine has stopped working or has become unsafe.

You might need clothes, or equipment for the home, or you could be faced by home maintenance costs that are beyond your ability to cover. Be guided by the terms of the charitable trust – if their ‘rules’ cover the type of need that you have, then you should try. Some charities are over-subscribed but others are little known and would be very pleased to hear from you.

They exist to help, so take the time to apply in the way that their trust requires. A personal letter may be all that is needed, but some will want to hear from a professional such as a GP and some charities will have designed a form to help ensure that all the information that they need is supplied first time.

So, maximise your income by using one of the benefit checkers that you will find online. Take time to use one of the charitable grant search tools that you will also find online. Finally, make sure that your PIP award is right for your current circumstances – the benefit checkers cannot do this.

They are really useful for checking monetary entitlement but not for assessing complex benefits such as child DLA or PIP.  Do not make the mistake of thinking that the Department for Work and Pensions knows best.

In an ideal world, you would be able to rely on their expertise, so that if they decided that you were not eligible, then that was the right decision, or that the award that they did make will accurately reflect your entitlement. Unfortunately, that is not always the reality.