1,069 Oldham residents get £60 vouchers after councillor identifies payment problem

Over 1,000 residents in Oldham have been sent a voucher for £60 after Councillor Sam Al-Hamdani identified that they had been missed off for a household support fund payment over Christmas.

After a resident had contacted him because their mother had not received the voucher, he organised her payment, but also asked why the problem had happened and if it had affected anyone else.

After pursuing the issue for three months, it was identified that the Department of Work and Pensions had changed the way in which they provided the qualifying data to the Council, which hadn’t been picked up. Once it was, and the data was processed correctly, an extra 1,069 residents were identified who had not received the initial payment.

Liberal Democrat Councillor Sam Al-Hamdani said: “I was frankly taken aback when I saw the number of people that it had affected.

“Both the council officers and I wanted to make sure that the problem couldn’t happen again. They did all the hard work of tracking down how the data from the Department of Work and Pensions had changed, resulting in it not getting processed properly. I just kept asking the question ‘Why has this happened?’.”

The payments are made to carers, disabled residents and housing benefit claimants who are not in receipt of Council Tax reductions.

Sam continued: “As a councillor, you take care of the problems that people come to you with, regardless of the number of people it affects. In this case, I started off just fixing one payment for one person.

“It’s definitely not every day that you end up doing something that benefits over 1,000 people. But it’s the sort of thing that you can only do by doing this job, and it really makes it worthwhile.”