On 8 March 2012 the Welfare Reform Act 2012 became law. The Act attempts to introduce a wide range of reforms to make the benefits and tax credits system fairer and simpler by:

• creating the right incentives to get more people into work
• protecting the most vulnerable in our society

• delivering fairness to those claiming benefit and to the tax payer.
This is widely seen as the biggest shake up of the welfare benefits system in the last 50 years and we at Eastlands Homes think that the changes will have a massive impact on our customers.

On the following pages we attempt to describe some of the main changes.   Please note we aren’t listing every change, just the main ones that we believe will have the biggest impact on our customers.

At Eastlands Homes, we have a dedicated Money Matters team to help customers at this difficult time.

Please feel free to get in touch – we are here to help.

We have a number of self assessment calculators for customers to use.  These will help you to quickly identify whether you are likely to be affected by any of the welfare benefit changes.  The links are shown below.

You can try out our under occupation calculator on our under occupation page by clicking here.
The government also have a benefit cap calculator which you can access by clicking here.

A benefit calculator is also available, click here to access it.