A benefits check that tells no one it was asked
A one-page note for benefits advisers — Carers UK, Citizens Advice, Age UK, and anyone who helps people claim.
What it is
Owed is a free, open benefits check for pension-age support and Carer's Allowance that runs entirely on the client's own device. No account, no server, no analytics: the page makes no network request at all — open your browser's network panel and watch. Saved to a memory stick, it works with the internet off. When the tab closes, it forgets everything — and while it is open, change one answer and watch the amounts move ("what if I claimed Attendance Allowance?").
That matters for the people advisers see most: the carer afraid that asking a question starts an investigation, the pensioner who will not put her savings into a government form. Every existing route — a calculator's server form, an email to a helpline — begins with telling someone. Owed is the look that comes before telling anyone; done well, its job is to bring that person to you sooner, with a saved file instead of a fear.
What it covers — deliberately small: Attendance Allowance · Carer's Allowance · Pension Credit (guarantee) · Housing Benefit (pension age) · Council Tax Reduction (pension age, England) · Winter Fuel Payment · free TV licence over 75 · Pension Age Disability Payment (Scotland) — plus the statutory pensionable-age table. Rates are pinned to a named tax year; when that year passes, the page says so loudly rather than going quietly wrong.
Why you can check it instead of trusting it
- Every question names the rule that lets it ask, and every amount shows its working, linked to legislation.gov.uk and gov.uk. A question with no cited rule cannot exist: the form is generated from the rules.
- The rules are small public data files anyone can read. An independent judge — a separate program — recomputes every test case from the same files on every change; the page is one client of those rules, never the door. Public enough, in fact, that the whole page can be rebuilt from them without us: the recipe is published, a rebuild that matches the judge needed nothing taken on trust, and a step-by-step guide covers running your own copy, April upratings included.
- The client can download their answers as a small file they keep. Nothing exists unless they choose to save it; they can bring the file to an appointment and drop it back in. Data minimisation by construction, not policy.
Where it stops
- It prompts a claim; it never makes one, and it is not advice. Your judgement stays the point of the appointment.
- Eight entitlements, pension-age weighted. No Universal Credit, no PIP, no working-age support. A full calculator (Turn2us, entitledto) still covers far more — this is the private first look that comes before it, not a replacement for it.
- Coverage is uneven across the UK: Scottish and Northern Irish equivalents are named where rules differ, but only Pension Age Disability Payment is encoded so far.
Why a carers' charity specifically. Behind this tool sits a corpus of fifty-four encoded institutional failures — one of them the Carer's Allowance overpayment scandal, worked through step by step: the state watched the earnings data as the debt grew, then prosecuted the growth. Owed is the other half of that finding — the earnings limit checked privately, before the first pound of overpayment, by the person it protects.
The ask
Run your hardest real cases against it, anonymised, next to the calculator you already use. Where it disagrees, misses, or asks a question badly, the rules are public and fixable — say so in the open, or reply to the sender. A tool for advisers should be corrected by advisers.