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Age Cyrmru is the new force combining Age Concern Cymru and
Help the Aged in Wales. Age Cymru is a member of the Age UK family.
The new force combining &
The Social Fund provides financial help to people who receive certain benefits (including Pension Credit) and need help with extra expenses. If you are on a low income‚ it is difficult to save for emergency expenses such as funeral costs or furniture for a new home.
There are different budgets and rules depending on where you live in the country‚ so get advice from a Citizens Advice Bureau (see 'Useful website') or another advice agency before you apply for a grant or loan.
There are two parts to the Social Fund - regulated and discretionary.
The regulated Social Fund covers:
Funeral payments: You may be able to get a payment towards funeral costs if you have good reason for taking responsibility for the expenses and you or your partner are receiving any of the benefits below:
Cold Weather payments: If you receive Pension Credit (PC), income-related Employment and Support Allowance (ESA), Income Support or income-based Jobseeker’s Allowance (JSA), which includes a pensioner or disability premium, you will receive a Cold Weather Payment for each week of very cold weather.
Winter Fuel payments: Winter Fuel Payments are paid to pensioner households to help with the cost of fuel. They are paid to most people aged 60 or over living in Great Britain and there are no income or savings limits.
The discretionary Social Fund provides three types of payments:
Community care grants: Grants may help you if you:
Bugeting loans: The applications for budgeting loans and community care grants are separate so it may be better to try for a non-repayable grant before you consider a loan.
Budgeting loans and community care grants can be given for items such as furniture, household equipment, clothing and footwear, removal costs or home improvements, maintenance and home security measures.
Crisis loans: Crisis loans are available to anyone; you don’t have to be getting any benefits. You may get a loan if you have emergency needs or are involved in a disaster (eg fire or flood) and the loan is necessary to prevent serious damage or risk to your health and safety. FS49 The Social Fund - June 2011 (PDF 172 KB)
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Citizens Advice Bureau is a national network of free advice centres.
Downloads
A download is a document (like a research report, a leaflet, or an application form) that can be transferred from our website to your computer. You can download a file, view it on your screen, print it, or save it to your computer.
PDF stands for ‘portable document format’.
Most downloads on this website are PDFs. We use this format to ensure that the document looks the same on everyone’s computer (website pages, by contrast, appear differently depending on how people have got their computer set up).
Computers use a program called Adobe Acrobat Reader to download PDFs. If you try clicking on a link to download a PDF and it doesn’t work, you will need to install Adobe Acrobat Reader onto your computer.
The process is quite straightforward and is free.
PDFs cannot be changed. If you need to be able to type into a downloaded document (for example, if we are offering a letter template that you need to put your name on) we will provide it as a Microsoft Word document rather than a PDF. You can then download it, type into it and save it to your computer.
Downloads will open on your computer in a new browser window.
Inside this window (below all your web browser menus), there will be a toolbar with options for you to print or save the document.
Close the browser window to return to the Age UK website.
We have made every effort to make our PDFs accessible to screen readers. Here is an overview of your accessibility options available in Acrobat Reader. Please ensure that you have downloaded the latest version of Acrobat Reader from the Adobe Reader website to ensure that they are included in your version of the programme.You can use Adobe Reader to read a PDF out loud with the following shortcut keys:
You can also convert a PDF into a web page by following these steps:
You can convert a PDF document into a text file for use with other software and hardware such as Braille printers by opening the PDF and choosing ‘Save as text’ from the File menu.
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