Someone mentioned Attendance Allowance to me when Mum first had her stroke.  It was just too much to think about at that point and for some reason, Dad or I discounted it later as we thought Mum wasn’t eligible for it.

In actual fact:

‘Attendance Allowance helps with extra costs if you have a disability severe enough that you need someone to help look after you.

It’s paid at two different rates and how much you get depends on the level of care that you need because of your disability.

You could get £68.10 or £101.75 a week to help with personal support if you’re both:

• physically or mentally disabled
• State Pension age or older

It does not cover mobility needs.

You do not have to have someone caring for you in order to claim.’

https://www.gov.uk/attendance-allowance

We found out that Mum and Dad are eligible at our first appointment with the hospice.  They applied for Dad on the spot as if a medical professional has said you might have 12 months or less to live, you are automatically entitled to the allowance.

The hospice are only involved in Dads care, but they were kind enough to let me know Mum would also be entitled and gave me a paper form to fill in for her.

In December 2023 it was reported that over 1.1 million pension age households in Great Britain could be missing out on £5.2 billion of Attendance Allowance per year.

Having looked at the form, I can see why.  🤦🏼‍♀️ It’s 30 pages and 63 questions long.  Some are very simple; some require long answers.

My experience:

• I filled in Mums form, but didn’t have all the information I needed on her exact care needs, so had to fill in those bits with Dad’s help.
• I did a second form with my cousin for my aunt. This time I knew what I was doing a bit more and it wasn’t as complex as my aunt is more independent than my Mum, yet it still took 2 hours.
• All that said, if you have your Little Black Book to hand, you have all the factual answers you need.
• Questions about support needs are not difficult and are actually mostly tickboxes with white space for extra information if you want to add it.
• The most complex part both times was Question 14.

Question 14 – asks for the name of illness or disability, how long you have had it for, what medicine or treatment has been prescribed and what is the dosage.

The issue both times is that my mum and my aunt both have more than one illness or disability, but I didn’t know which medication was for which condition.  It’s possible to work out some connections using Google or the leaflets that come in the tablet boxes though, so we did that.  I’m not sure in either case I got the matches entirely right as some of it was guess work , but Mums application was processed and approved so maybe it doesn’t have to be 100% accurate.

Useful point:  You can sign on behalf of someone else – for example if you have Power of Attorney or you fulfil other criteria.  We haven’t got the Power of Attorney though yet (I made a mistake on them resulting in another 20 week delay 🤦🏼‍♀️), so I chose the option to be appointed to act on Mum’s behalf.  As a result of that, I got a phone call from a very lovely man telling me that Mum had to be interviewed and I had to be there.  We assumed that it was so Mum could be assessed to see if she met the criteria, but when a second man called to book in the interview he said he couldn’t tell me anything about what would happen.  This caused a bit of worry for Mum as she doesn’t like being ‘tested’.  However, it turned out that actually I was the one being interviewed, to check I was Mum’s daughter and it wasn’t a fraudulent claim.  I think this is because when you are appointed, you can have the benefit put in your bank account and take charge of it entirely.  I hadn’t opted for that, but presumably they have to tick all boxes; it’s just a shame they didn’t give me enough information so Mum hadn’t had to worry.  So don’t worry if you get an interview call in the same circumstances.

So Muddled Life Tip Summary:

• Go here for all the information on the government site.
• The form is here.  You can fill it out online or print it.
• There are guidelines to fill in the form here
• Get together all the Little Black book information
• Find all medications relevant to the disability
• Put aside an initial two hours if you want to do it in one go
• If you leave a question to go back to, stick a post it at the top of the page or something – the page numbers didn’t print out on my copy which made it really tricky to go back to bits I left until the end.
• Ultimately, JUST DO IT – it gives the freedom to pay for things like a cleaner when physical things get tricky or an occasional carer or taxis when driving isn’t possible so that the recipient gets to live the best life they can.

I hope that helps if this is something you didn’t know about or hadn’t got around to yet.