There has been plenty of info in the national media over the weekend about the pause/delay in the ‘managed migration’ of people from ‘legacy benefits’ to UC ie moving people to the new benefit fro their current benefits. This has led to some confusion as the roll out of UC continues as the managed migration was only one element of the process. At the moment, if you have a change in circumstances you will need to apply for UC as a new claimant. A change in circumstances can cover a range of things like having another child, change in income, change in rent etc. The rate of this change is greater than anticipated with between 10-25% of claimants being affected ie this number of people have a change in circs which triggers a UC claim, so more people are moving to UC as a matter of course, even before managed migration comes into force. For instance, there are now over 2000 claims for UC locally with 65 new claims over the last weekend.
Our local project on UC will go ahead from April 2019, with funding from the DWP that has been secured by Cit A and will be passed to local offices. In preparation for this we are having a paid team ‘awayday’ focussing on the UC project in early Feb and also a kiaa event for frontline staff and guests which will feature local partnership plans for sharing knowledge/problems/training/support for claimants . The local partnership event will be on March 20th at lunchtime and bookings will open in Feb for this. So, even if there is a parliamentary ‘pause’ there is a local full speed ahead approach 🙂
