When does the Warm Home Discount get paid to me?

Hi ​@Mike Hansen ,

OVO can only issue it to you AFTER the DWP sends you the WHD Eligibility Letter, which are being done in waves. Until then, OVO won’t know you qualify.

Please wait for the DWP letter and follow the instructions - OVO can’t help you until then.

Actually I got the WHD credited to my OVO account a week before I got the letter from the DWP.

There again they were probably both issued on the same day and it just took a week for the post.

I got it credited already, but haven’t received a letter yet. My guess, it will arrive on this week. 

Hey ​@Mike Hansen,

Keep an eye on your account! You might see the funds show up before the letter arrives. As Costeek and Nukecad mentioned, I really hope it comes through for you soon. It’s a great help, especially during this time of year!​

I received the letter - took approx seven days to arrive. 

My letter arrived on 5 November, but I had to jump through the ‘call us’ hoop to persuade them that I qualified*. I think the payment authorization was issued immediately. The discount dropped into my account today.

My next steps:

1. Reduce my DD to the £12 recommended.
2. Apply for a refund of £120. This would leave a balance of more than 3 x £12, so the automaton should approve it.
3. Once confirmation of the refund turns up, revert the DD to what it was before, to pre-empt any move by the DD gestapo.

The £30 left behind serves to boost the balance at 31 March next to the now-required one month’s costs. Do we think this will work?
  

*   I’m not absolutely sure of the reason for this (I had to do it last year as well), but the nice young lady let slip that the name my DWP letter was addressed to isn’t identical to that on my OVO account. I wonder how many others are caught in the same trap.

I’ve has similar at other places, if I try to uses ‘Steve’ then I’m not recognised because the account says ‘Steven’.

Personally I’m still juggling my DDs to give a zero or very slight credit balance at the end of March, then I’ll build up a months credit over 12 months starting from April.

That’s pretty indefensible. In my case, it’s the difference between first name, First name and Christian Name. Forms ask for one or the other of these, which aren’t necessarily the same. Modern systems will have become intelligent at some stage, so that ‘Steve’ and ‘Steven’ should be treated as the same, other things being equal. It may have become problematic in the last half-century or so, when it became commonplace for nicknames of the ‘Steve’ variety to be given to infants as proper names - Gary (< Gareth), Zak (< Zacharias), Jack (< John) or, infamously, Harrison and Lilibet (<<  Henry and < Elizabeth respectively). Computers can’t possibly tell whether a name submitted is ‘proper’ or a sobriquet.

I realize as I’m typing this that it’s more complicated than so ...

But if you make that change, then you have the Scunthorpe Problem…

Unfortunately, it’s easier to just enforce exact match than it is to try and do fuzzy matches. Unless it’s for car number plates where fuzzy matches can actually be possible...

Yes, it gets complicated, with possible security implications these days.

So probably best (and easiest) if they just stick with insisting on a precise match.

That died down years ago. I was born in Scunthorpe, so I was plagued by this problem all through the nineties and beyond. Nobody cares these days.

Well, it seems that it did. As far as I can tell, the system didn’t mind my changing the DD amount twice in a day, but I couldn’t wait any longer because otherwise there’d be less than a week to DD Day and I wasn’t sure whether changing at that stage would work. Now I just wait for the refund to land.

Meanwhile, I sit and ponder over why this exercise should be necessary. We’re back at the status quo, except that my bank balance is a bit healthier (assuming all goes well). Basing the online refund limit on the size of the DD is perhaps easier than anything else, but it can be illogical - as I think I demonstrated.

TBH, I don’t expect that many will have a recommended DD of just £12, but I may be wrong.

But yes we are having to jump through hoops just to be paying what we should be paying and no more.
I feel sorry for those who’s maths skills may not be up to the job of working it out.

I worked out last month that my £150 Warm Home Discount credit would be swallowed up by OVO getting my account to a month in credit by the end of March - if I let that happen.

The WHD is for my benefit, not to inflate my account credit and thus OVO’s bank balance. and I will be taking fairly unusual steps to make sure thatthe WHD comes to my benefit (whilst still having a credit balance on March 31st).

It seems that unusual steps are what we need to take now just to keep ourselves in a reasonable balance.

I received  a letter in October  saying  I automatically  qualify  for the £150 WHD I have still  not received  the WHD I'm on pre payment  meters and was told I would  receive  a voucher to cash at the post office 

Morning ​@deluce53, I hope you’re well.

I’ve sent you a private message - have a read and get back to me when you can.

Cheers!