ESA - gift of money problem

Hello, I hope someone can advise as I feel sick with worry over this. I’ll try to keep this brief, but it’s complicated (or I’m complicating it).

So I recently received a surprise cash gift of around £10k from a distant relative who passed away. They’d been trying to find me for a while before they passed, so it wasn’t deemed an inheritance.

After calling ESA daily for a week and spending over 90mins on hold each time, only to be cut off, I finally got to speak with someone today. They said they just needed a letter from the solicitor who handled the gift, to show how much I received. In the middle of the conversation, the call cut out again. A little later I received a call from somebody else who said “you were speaking to my colleague but hung up on them” which I really didn’t, I was in the middle of asking where to send this letter. Anyway, she informed me my claim has been suspended “to prevent an overpayment” and I now have to provide 3 months of bank statements for a “capital review”.

I understand they can ask for these at any time, although it feels so invasive. One problem is that previously I didn’t have a bank account, all payments etc went into my husband’s. We opened a new joint account, which my husband transferred to and so his old account is closed. We’ve only had the new account for a week, so not long enough for a statement to be generated, but we have statements from the old account, letters from the new bank and the solicitors showing what was transferred re the gift, and a letter from the old account showing the £700 which was transferred over to the new account. Will this be sufficient, do you think?

We’ve nothing to hide, we have no other capital or anything like that. I’m just really concerned that they’ll be judging where we spend our money. Due to disability we buy everything online, including everything we need for our 4 children. Do they then put limits on what we can spend the cash gift on/how long it must last? We really need to make some adaptions to the house as I’m currently living mostly upstairs as I can’t manage stairs anymore. Do I have to go through this every time that money drops? Lastly, if we have that £700 in there (or roughly that amount), will this be added to our cash gift and thus used to work out deductions from our ESA, even though this money is needed for living expenses? Does anyone know the address I need to send these documents to?

I am so sorry this is so complicated. I tried to ask the lady who phoned but she was so abrupt and I think annoyed that she thought I’d hung up the earlier call. I’m totally overwhelmed, my dad died 2 months ago, my mum is on end of life care and I’m really struggling to keep on top of everything as it is. Thanks so much in advance.

Hi Chris, thank you so much for your reply. I really do appreciate it. It’s been one of those “surely nothing else can go wrong” years, and I’m barely clinging on. Your kindness is so appreciated.

That’s really good to know, I’m hopeful it’s straight forward and I’m just overthinking. I’ve just had another thought, I have a personal injury trust (part of my disability is due to a really extreme case of medical negligence). As it’s in a trust, it’s disregarded for the purpose of benefits, but I’m now wondering if I need to be declaring that also? There’s not much in there now as we bought our house from the landlord to give us some security (renting as a disabled family became untenable and it seemed a good use of those funds). The rest (£2k>) is set aside for house emergencies.

The lady was just so rude and I got the feeling it was all because they thought I’d hung up. Which is a ridiculous notion given how long I’d spent trying to get through to them - is being cut off a regular thing with these helplines, I wonder?

Anyway, I am so grateful for your insight. Hopefully another mod will be able to advise on the other questions. I do catastrophise with these things, but only because I’ve had so many bad experiences with the benefits system.

Ps. I chose my forum name to hopefully make people smile - I’m glad it seemed to work 😉