Hi all, I hope I am posting this in the right forum, please accept my apologies if not. I am currently in receipt of Housing Benefit and ESA. I have been placed in the Support Group for ESA, which will be reviewed in a few months time. The nature of my illness is mental, although defining it has seemed to pose a problem for the people responsible for my care. I have been signed off sick from work for almost a year. I have been depressed and very anxious, and I have rarely left the house in that time. I have managed to survive by shopping online and taking deliveries for food and essentials. I rarely see family or friends, and I get picked up and dropped off when this occurs. During the week I don't normally interact with anyone, as I am at home on my own. After waiting around seven months, I was invited to see my local CMHT for assessment. This was after my SSP had ended, and I had been placed in the Support Group. The CMHT has now finished it's assessment, and they believe I should be referred to the local complex needs service. This has caused two major problems. One, the complex needs service is full, and they don't appear to have a waiting list. Two, even if the service was available, I wouldn't be able to get there on my own. During the few times I met with the assessment team, I was taken by my parents. They cannot do this twice a week however, because they both work full time and look after my much younger siblings. I feel completely stuck. I cannot access any more assistance from the CMHT, because I can't leave the house. The treatment they believe I need, isn't available anyway! No-one from the local team seems able to help me access any additional help, and my GP doesn't know who else to contact. Does anyone here know who I could turn to next? Sorry for the epic post, I tried to keep it as brief as possible.

Hi, my partner and I have been taking care of a then 15 year old girl for 18 months. The council decided it was 'private fostering' which means that the parents agree and pay for the arrangement. There never was such an arrangement, since the girl had run away from home and her dad did not want anything to do with her anymore. We received some money from the council (£400) but they stopped the payments when they discovered we had claimed Child Tax Credits. Due to a mistake from our side, we were overpaid the Child Tax Credit and now have to pay back £2700! We would like to ask Social Services to pay this amount, since they stopped all payments when they heard that we were receiving this money. Does anyone have any experience with cases like this, are we in our right to claim it from the council? We have fought for a long time to get any sort of expense payment and never received it from them, although the child has now been placed in foster care which is costing Social Services £400 a week in foster payments to the 'official' foster parents. We have saved them over the 18 months 78weeks x £400 = £31200, so I believe that asking them for only £2700 is quite a good deal for them still! Or is anyone aware of lawyers who would be interested and willing to have a look into this?

I have just been treated in the most vile and sickening manner regarding my mortgage and will almost certainly be shortly evicted (there has already been one eviction order which was suspended). Does anyone have any ideas of how I might deal with this. Unfortunately, it will take an age to write down all the details and you readers will become bored witless. Birmingham Mudshires said I couldn’t pay them a large capital sum to cover a three year period of time needed to remain unemployed to look after small child as single parent and sort out the horrendous problems that had been caused by the child’s Mother becoming severely mentally ill. The money eventually disappeared and before I actually got into arrears I wrote explaining that I was in the most horrendous circumstances and asked the building society if they would be happy accepting only the DHSS contribution of mortgage interest of about £400 which was about half the total amount of £800 monthly. They said yes, but immediately charged monthly default fees and two months later the harassing telephone calls started in which they denied any knowledge of previous agreement to accept only DHSS contribution. In one of these abusive telephone calls they said they were not interested in giving me further time to sort out an income while looking after my child at the same time and said they ‘would let the court decide’ if I should be given the opportunity of sufficient time to sort things out. They seemed to imply by this that they were incapable of making their own decisions and must somehow rely on a court to make their decisions for them because they lacked that capacity. A strange form of buck passing to deny any responsibility for their obviously unreasonable behaviour ! Within just seven days I had the summons for reposession. I was approximately only three months in arrears at that time with the DHSS continuing to pay half the monthly amount. My annual arrears were therefore accumulating at about £5 000 against an annual average increase in the value of the £220 000 house of perhaps £22 000 at 10% per annum, or even £11 000 at an annual increase of only 5%. As I owed about £150 000 I also had equity of about £70 000. Why foreclose and evict someone in those circumstances ? At this point I became severely ill and had a hospital date for abdominal surgery at the same time as the repossession hearing. I requested an adjournment until after the recovery period of six weeks after surgery. I was unable to get any proper legal representation because solicitor after solicitor either said they didn’t do legal aid any more, or they did but not for mortgage issues. It took about a hundred telephone calls to find this out. I was granted an initial adjournment but the building society went back to the court behind my back and listed a hearing for a time when I had only just returned from what had been a major abdominal surgery. Barely capable of even walking, I made it to the court just seven minutes later than the time my case was listed. I was told by the usher the case had already been decided by default in favour of repossession by the building society. I could not therefore go into court as the case had completed, with several others - just seven minutes after listing ! Without going into the gory details it had been literally impossible not to be late and the precise reason for being late at all was directly related to the surgery and was a clear illustration of why it was ludicrous to expect me to be in court so soon after surgery (five abdominal incisions, moving the liver and pancreas around to get at other things, sewing bits of stomach around the oesophagus and stitching the diaphragm up) and well within the recovery period the surgeon had told me to remain in bed/at home/convalesing. So I now have a repossession order and suspended eviction order and they are simply waiting until after christmas to throw me out with two weeks notice. My son and I will then be homeless and I will inevitably lose most of my household possessions and also lose any immediate possibility of working. Are they real bastards or what ?