#PauseAndFix - Why are we Waiting for Universal Credit?

Here's the text of an email I sent my MP ahead of last week's Opposition debate on Universal Credit.  While there has, rightly, been increasing concern about the built-in six-week delay prior to the first payment, another waiting issue hasn't made the headlines...

I am delighted that Labour have won a debate on a proposal to pause the roll-out of Universal Credit.  For the good of millions of less well-off citizens, it is vital that this happens. 

Personally, I think Universal Credit is so flawed that it should be stopped in its tracks and the whole project reworked, as it is simply not fit to be at the core of our Social Security system for a generation or more.  I’m sure others will have briefed you on the many problems being encountered with UC.  Rightly, the long wait for the first payment has been grabbing the headlines recently but there is another issue around ‘waiting’ that seems to have slipped below the radar, and that is the seven ‘waiting days’ at the start of new claims.

Since 2014, when the number was increased from three, the first seven days of your claim for JSA or ESA have been ‘waiting days’ for which you receive no benefit.  If you lodged a claim today (13^th October), your payments would be based on entitlement from 20^th October.  However, there are no waiting days for Income Support and Tax Credits, while Housing Benefit awards are usually calculated from the Monday following your date of claim.  Someone claiming JSA or ESA for her/himself and her/his partner therefore has seven days without payment of that benefit at the start of their claim, but can get support for their children and housing costs during that first week.  Someone claiming Income Support (usually a carer or lone parent) also receives their earnings replacement benefit from their date of claim.

As you know, Universal Credit rolls all of these benefits into one.  It also counts the first seven days of the claim as ‘waiting days’ in the majority of new claims.  This means that a UC claimant not only misses out on their earnings replacement benefit for seven days, they receive no support for their children for that week, nor for their housing costs.  For a jobless couple with two children and rent of £100 per week, instead of missing out on around £115 due to waiting days under the current regime, they would be over £300 down under UC.  For larger families and where rents are higher than they are in Stoke-on-Trent (ie. just about everywhere!) the losses from extending the waiting day principle to children and housing costs can be significantly higher. 

The higher this shortfall for the first week, the less chance there is of the family affected being able to clear the debts built up as a result – especially rent arrears – when their first payment eventually arrives.  For those not working, UC gives them an income set at no more than the minimum this Government believes they need to live on; for families hit by the Benefit Cap, it is often very much less.  They have no money to clear debts and pay down rent arrears.  By the time working families have paid travelling costs and part of their childcare, they too are unlikely to have spare cash. 

I do hope you will be able to support the call for a UC roll-out pause when it comes to Parliament as I genuinely believe there is a chance to win this vote.  I hope you will also be able to support your colleagues lobbying for further major reforms of UC; you might urge a review of the ‘waiting days’ concept as one way to make it less punishing.

A Typical Day

There is understandable outrage on social media today, regarding a post stating that the Tories are now denying people benefits for using foodbanks.  It is illustrated with a photograph of a form on which a finding that a person has no problem with their lower limb function is justified by the statement: 'He walks to the foodbank when he needs to.  This takes 30 minutes.'

With all due respect to whoever has posted this as an example of Conservative benefits cruelty, it absolutely isn't about having your benefits cut because you can use a foodbank.  If this ESA claimant used to rely on points for mobility to qualify - the photo is clearly an extract from an ESA85 form, completed by a Health Professional (their phrase, not mine) at a face-to-face assessment for this benefit - he would have forfeited those points regardless of where his 30 minute walk took him, be it to the shops, to church or even to his local Conservative Club.  If you can reliably walk 200 metres or more, you cannot score points for ESA activity 1.  If you are walking for 30 minutes, you are, in all probability, walking more than 200 metres.  Therefore, no points; not under the 2011 descriptors, nor under the original 2008 New Labour set.

So, has justice been done here?  Despite what I have written above, the odds are that it has not.  I've seen enough ESA85s to know that they frequently contain fewer hard, objective facts than The Chronicles of Narnia. 

The reference to walking to the foodbank was almost certainly drawn from the part of the assessment in which the Health Professional discusses the claimant's "typical day" with them.  It's possible that the HP and their "customer" had an in-depth chat about this journey but, unless the claimant's mobility really is too good to matter for ESA, it's far more likely that the conversation went something like this...

HP: Where do you do your shopping?

C: I haven't been able to do any shopping for the last couple of weeks.  I don't have enough money.  I've been going to the foodbank.

HP: How do you get there?

C: I walk.

HP: How long does it take you?

[Meaning 'how long is the walk there']

C: About half an hour [Meaning 'it takes me half an hour to get there, wait for my three day food parcel and walk back']

It's also possible that the claimant did walk for 30 minutes, going out with his voucher on a 'good day' after perhaps being stranded at home unable to make the journey for a few not-so-good days.  Or that the journey was made in stages, stopping to recover after a few tens of metres before gamely pressing on.  It's unlikely that the conversation between him and the HP went into anything like sufficient depth to establish this.  It almost never does.

Whatever the case, it's disingenuous to suggest he has been refused benefit for using a foodbank or that this is the fault of the present Government.  What we've got here is a problem that's existed for over a decade: a crazy assessment system where a health worker with no prior knowledge of a sick or disabled person - and usually no special insight into their specific health conditions - carries out a cursory examination, asks a set of standard questions from a computer system which offers all-too-easy-to-select standard answers, makes some informal observations, overlays a layer of subjective unconscious prejudices and recommends points to the DWP Decision Maker on this deeply unsatisfactory basis. 

Meanwhile the claimant makes rough guess answers to badly-phrased questions about their typical day - where they like to go, what they watch on TV - that they haven't expected to be asked and haven't actually thought about, as they thought this was a medical, not a first date.  The resulting ESA85 is inevitably a travesty of the truth, yet almost always the key item of evidence on which the Decision Maker bases the award/fit for work decision, often in defiance of other sound medical evidence. 

We now know too, thanks to a freedom of information request, that the DWP are under pressure of internal targets to uphold these decisions if challenged, forcing people to struggle and starve while they wait for a tribunal to hear their case, or abandon their ESA claim and instead try to navigate their way through JSA or Universal Credit, built-in delays, sanctions and all. 

There is more than enough real hardship and cruelty here without spinning it.  Shamefully, most of it pre-dates IDS and his successors.