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UC Natural/ Managed Migration Figures Revealed-
Natural migration onto UC is due to a change of circumstance that prompts a new claim. Managed migration on the other hand is where the government tells clients that it is time to move over anyway. A managed migration pilot is due to start for 10,000 clients over 12 months in the Harrogate area, with the full scale roll out due from 2020- 2024.

UC transitional payments inadequate- The High Court has ruled that proposed Universal Credit migration regulations giving transitional payments for those who received severe disability premium before 16 January 2019 are unlawful. The government has to now come up with new proposals.

Compensation Claims if Clients Moved Wrongly onto UC-
Neil Couling, Change Director General and Senior Responsible Owner Universal Credit, has confirmed that in 5 cases (out of 26 complaints), the DWP has paid compensation where claimants were misadvised to claim Universal Credit when there was no relevant change of circumstances and who were left worse off as as result. Mr Couling says he would welcome further claims- ask clients to contact their MP's for help and claim via the financial redress for injustice resulting for maladministration scheme.

Benefit Overpayments Taken from UC- During training with us, lots of you have been explaining that often clients are often seeing recovery of old benefit overpayments from their UC. The government figures say- '...in April 2019, 280,000 payments of Universal Credit (UC) had a deduction applied to repay a non UC debt owed to the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), and 340,000 payments of UC had a deduction applied to repay a Tax Credit debt'(this compares to around 1.4million claimants of UC at the time).

UC Social Landlords-
The government has said in their May 2019 Landlord Engagement Newsletter that most social landlords now have access to the landlord portal. 'As of 1 May 2019, there are 723 landlords enrolled on the portal ...The enrolled landlords represent over 96% of the total SRS housing stock in England'.

3 year Sanctions to be Stopped- Amber Rudd has said, 'Three-year sanctions are rarely used,... I have now decided to remove three year sanctions and reduce the maximum sanction length to six months by the end of the year....Conditionality and sanctions are an important part of the welfare system, motivating claimants to engage with the support on offer to look for work while ensuring the system is fair to the taxpayer...the Department is currently carrying out a further evaluation into the effectiveness of UC sanctions '.

Latest UC sanction statistics Say- '...More than four-fifths of ended UC sanctions lasted 13 weeks or less...Failure to attend or participate in a Work-Focussed Interview accounted for 86% of all adverse decisions'.

2 million on UC- As of 11 April 2019, just under 2 million people were on Universal Credit; of these, 610,000 (33%) were in employment.

Book now for our updated An Overview of Universal Credit 2019 and our new Universal Credit- the tricky parts 2019 courses.

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