Financial Advocacy & Appointeeship

Financial advocacy

Financial advocacy means supporting you to have control over your own money.

If you choose ICMS, we will become your financial advocate and we can support you in many ways:

We will meet you and talk to you and your support team and we will involve you in decisions about your money.
We will check that you are getting the right benefits and help you to complete claims forms.
We will support you to make a budget for spending your money and we will check it with you regularly to make sure it is up-to-date.
We can also open a separate ICMS bank account for your money.
Where appropriate, we can support you to get a Motability vehicle and support you to manage your budget to pay for it.

Appointeeship

If ICMS is your appointee, we will manage your benefit money for you. We will also be your Financial Advocate which means as well as all the things we do as your financial advocate
(See above paragraph), we will manage your benefits as well.

What is an appointee?

An appointee is allowed to manage someone’s benefit money for them if they are unable to
do this for themselves, this is called lack of capacity and can be due to learning disability or some other condition such as acquired brain injury.

If you cannot manage your benefits yourself, you can choose someone or an independent company such as ICMS to be your appointee. If you choose ICMS as your appointee, we
will talk to the Government’s Department for Work and Pensions about your benefits for you.

If ICMS is your appointee:

  • We will open a separate ICMS bank account just for your benefit money. Your benefits will be paid into this account and we can make payments from it on your behalf.
  • We will claim all the benefits you are entitled to.
  • We will write to the Department for Work and Pensions if anything changes that they need to know about.
  • We will pay your benefit money to you in the way you want.
  • We will tell you about what benefit money you are getting.
  • We will act as  your Financial Advocate and speak up for you or write letters to important people for you. This could be the social work department or the Department for Work and Pensions or any other people you need to write to about your money.

If you do not understand some of the words or statements written above you can contact us for advice or speak to your social worker if you have one.