Waiting for viva and JSA?
I can't advise on council tax though you should receive some reduction either as a full time student or Universal Credit claimant. You won't get JSA as a new claimant now.
You won't receive benefits if you are registered as a full time student. Exceptions may include attendance allowance or personal independance payments if disabled. If you're a full time carer, you can receive carer's allowance provided you are not earning roughly £125 a week and looking after someone on either attendance allowance or personal independance payments.
You can receive universal credit if you are registered as a part-time student studying <=12 hours a week. You also need to be actively looking for work to the satisfaction of Job Centre Plus advisors and Case Workers.
You might look to changing your registration to part-time in order to entitle yourself to universal credit. One point here are that your PhD supervisors might object in their interests in seeing you submit by the end of year four.
Another option is given you're in year four and can show Job Centre Plus you've no income on your bank statements, is to not tell Job Centre Plus you are still registered a full-time student. It's a little dodgy this but as the University cannot give out confidential information on its students unless presented with a court order, there's not a mechanism for Job Centre Plus to find out. A court order may only be sought if there is clear evidence of wrong doing and as you've no income there will be no evidence. Many year four students have done this historically I hate to say (ahem).
A part-time job alongside your year four writing up is probably the best approach. Either that or hope your department 'invent' an RA post to finance your writing up period, this being obviously common from the RA adverts you see.
As you can gather, I received lots of advice on this issue way back when I was writing up.
Ian
I know you mean well but what you are suggesting here is benefits fraud and will lead to a criminal conviction and/or a prison sentence and probably the end of your career if you are caught. Don't assume it's easy to get away with this. Universal Credits and JSA before it are specifically for people actively seeking work. A full time student is not considered to be in a position to actively seek work and are therefore not allowed to claim either. That is the law whether we like it or not. Break that law at your peril.
I know and I personally wouldn't advise it.
However, I'm aware of at least two alledged instances of this happening and in one of these, the supervisor supposedly suggested it. There will probably be others.
It's not good and not clever in my eyes, I'll admit. But I've been told it happens. The logic and sense if allowable is to try to change registration to part-time and actively look for work.
Ian
