Sick & facing a DWP glitch that leaves me penniless

Hi,

I had just gotten out of the hospital with a severe episode of CVS and status epilepticus (when epileptic seizures don’t stop and it becomes life threatening), when I found out that the DWP had reduced me £34.50 to live on. They insisted this wasn’t a mistake, however, I have found out that it was. I have actually been being underpaid since Dec 2023, when Universal Credit accidentally told me I was illegally double claiming carer’s allowance. I wasn’t. My carer’s allowance was suspended as they needed the income & expenses from when I was self-employed. I never received this letter, only the mistake from UC. It turns out, this entire time, UC have been taking £81.50 from my money weekly because they believed I was getting Carer’s Allowance. So not only am I receiving no money currently, I’ve been horribly underpaid for over a year- which has left my disabled son and I barely surviving. Now, I will not have enough to survive at all until they repair months of damage, which could take weeks.

I need to be able to afford a special diet as most foods make me ill & I cannot cook. I need to be able to afford incontinence pants, kool paks, additional electricity and water due to having greater laundry loads as a result of incontinence, and kettles for constant hot water bottles to help with my pain. I need to be able to pay for things to be delivered here as I cannot easily go outside. I need to be able to pay for clinnell wipes and bed bath wipes. I need to pay for taxis because I find public transport a struggle and cannot do it on my own. I must have my phone with internet to be able to ask people for help. And I have a great many additional needs besides, but I also need to meet the needs everyone does- disabled or not, and £34.50 per week (£1794 per year, whilst a single person is expected to earn around £29500 per year to reach a minimum standard of living- so I’m being expected to survive on less than a 16th of the minimum standard of living).

There is nothing I have done or not done to cause this glitch. I have written multiple messages to universal credit begging for help and explaining the issues only to repeatedly be told there was nothing wrong because, it seems, there’s no joined up communication between UC & CA, despite them both being interconnected DWP departments, who had information available to them which I didn’t.

Please help me survive whilst CA process this 15 months worth of fault before I am returned to a normal level of subsistence income. I will be having my WCA soon, which I missed last month when I was very sick in hospital. I am hoping this will also resolve things in the right way, but until then, i need to be able to survive whilst extremely unwell. Any donations are massively appreciated.