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Disabled people and their carers are being helped by a new benefit, writes Neil Bateman.

What is the enhanced disability premium and who can qualify?

Yet another of those social security phrases which is sure to confuse, the enhanced disability premium (EDP), was part of a package of improvements introduced last April for people with disabilities and their carers.

That package included a significant increase in the carers' premium for income-related benefits as well as a long overdue increase in the earnings limit for invalid care allowance and a reduction in the lower age limit for disability living allowance mobility component.

Together they represent a massive increase in benefits for many disabled people and their carers. And, as Gary Vaux pointed out in this column recently, we can expect more improvements to carers' benefits in the near future (Welfare Rights, 22 August). After many years of neglect, benefits for carers have been upgraded.

One group in particular, families with disabled children, experienced a significant increase in their incomes as a result of the April changes. Research shows that such families are the group at most risk of long-term poverty, so anything that improves their living standards is consistent with the pledge to abolish child poverty.

Of course, the downside of this is that - immensely welcome as improvements are - the emphasis on delivering anti-poverty measures through means-testing has some real paradoxes: the inevitable complexity, high administrative costs, poor take-up, high error rate and poverty trap effect all undermine the wider agenda of tackling child poverty.

The EDP is specifically aimed at people under 60 who receive the higher rate care component of disability living allowance. This means that not only those with disabled children qualify; indeed, anyone under 60 who receives the higher rate does, and there are none of the hopelessly complicated rules associated with the severe disability premium (which, incidentally, can be paid as well as the EDP).

You may query why pensioners are excluded. This is a for a number of reasons. First is the general policy desire to simplify means tests for older people - watch this space as pension credit develops. Second is the fact that the pensioners minimum income guarantee has already succeeded in putting their income support level way above that of any other group, and that gap will grow as the MIG increases in line with earnings each year. At some stage action will have to be taken to bridge that gap.

Like all the premiums, EDP is not a separate benefit but simply an addition to the formula for working out means-tested benefits. It adds £11.05 for single people and children and £16 for couples where either one or both get higher rate DLA care.

The effect of this adjustment to the formula is that people would have seen an increase in their income support last April and people with incomes which were up to £11.05 too high for income support may now qualify. One group in particular who could gain are single people on incapacity benefit, which at the higher long-term rate will usually put them above the income support level.

An award of DLA care could get them onto income support through the severe disability premium if they live alone but if they live with someone else, they might now get income support because of the EDP. It's worth checking income support entitlement for people you work with who fall into this category.

Finally, a question: why has there been so little publicity about this change? Might it be the policy tension between tackling poverty by improving the benefits system but not wanting to increase expenditure?

- More details about the EDP are on page 822 of the current Child Poverty Action Group Welfare Benefits Handbook. For a copy go to the CPAG website at www.cpag.org.uk and click on "publications".