The Guidance (Annex C) provides a list of benefits which MUST BE DISREGARDED for income assessment purposes – so the council sector does not have to include those in a policy – the assumption is that councils will act under the Guidance and the Guidance is based on the regualations. Everything else is allowed to be taken into account and councils have a broad discretion to ignore any income they think should be ignored.
See here: paragraphs 15 and 16 identify the benefits that must be fully disregarded, for all clients, and the ones that MUST be taken into account for care home clients
15) Any income from the following sources must be fully disregarded:
(a) Direct Payments
(b) Guaranteed Income Payments made to veterans under the Armed Forces Compensation Scheme
(c) War Pension Scheme payments made to veterans with the exception of Constant Attendance Allowance payments
(d) the mobility component of Disability Living Allowance
(e) the mobility component of Personal Independence Payments
The Guidance could not say it was ok to take one that is included in the Charging Regulations as required to be disregarded, of course.
A local policy is for informing the exercise of discretion and the general position is that they can count anything that they are not required to disregard. That suggests to us that they do not have to be very specific in their policy – they can assume people know the law and can read the Guidance, apart from the Care Act duty to ensure that advice and information is available, of course. But if they change their minds and decide to stop disregarding something they’ve been generous about, and go back to the normal position that they don’t have to disregard it, they would normally be expected under the law of consultation and the Equality Act to explain themselves to a cross section of those affected and to ensure that their policy’s content itself was up to date.