Further punitive restrictions on Universal Credit are on the way.
Further punitive restrictions on Universal Credit are on the way
The latest development of Ian Duncan Smith’s Universal Credit scheme will soon mean that people made unemployed will have to wait at least five weeks before getting any financial support.
At present it’s two weeks; still a long time to wait when you have bills to pay and mouths to feed.
Some of this is administrative delay, but with the new five week wait it will be a deliberate strategy to force people into immediate work or push them into penury – the latter being more likely in an economy where jobs increasingly can’t actually fund even basic necessities like housing and energy costs.
That’s why the TUC have launched a campaign to ‘Stop the Five Week Wait’ as part of their Saving Our Safety Net project, launching a petition against IDS’ impoverishment strategy.
It poses a very clear question: how long could you go without any income? Even for those in work, many have to scrape together money from friends and family at the end of the month in what some call ‘scrounge week’. Imagine that week becoming five.
Why so long? A whole calendar month will be spent ‘assessing’ the amount of benefit you’ll be able to receive. Then you’ll have to wait a week for the DWP to actually arrange your payment.
But you’ll also have a week-long period when you will be unable to even apply for Universal Credit. The government is deciding whether this will be during the assessment period or beforehand, meaning potentially sixweeks in assessment, admin and spiteful restrictions.
And this from a government that supposedly hates bureaucracy and red tape.
There will be some emergency support available. But the rules on who can claim it will be so strict that very few able to claim Universal Credit will be eligible. Richard Exell at the TUC writes that “one reason for being turned down, for instance, will be that your family has debts that might make it hard for you to repay the advance.” Unbelievable.
The public are against it, understandably – by 70 per cent to 18 per cent when told about the policy. Even the vast majority of UKIP and Conservative voters oppose the wait.
But there’s a problem: just 13 per cent have actually heard of it. We need, therefore, to spread the word fast if there’s to be any chance of stopping this disastrous scheme going under wraps.
The policy can be summarised quite simply: the state safety net being outsourced to food banks and payday loan sharks. This is a government hand-out to Wonga and co, while returning to the Victorian welfare state of unreliable charity. TUC general secretary Frances O’Grady has branded it ‘cruel and vindictive’.
It comes in next April – just a month before the General Election. With a strong enough campaign, it can be halted or pushed beyond that date. So there is an opportunity for the opposition to succeed. Millions of people who might be made redundant over the coming years are relying on that outcome.
You can read the TUC’s report on the five week wait, Universal Credit: Solving the problem of delay in benefit payments, here.
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18 Responses to “Could you go five weeks without money? Under a new DWP plan you might have to”
littleoddsandpieces
The most recent signer of my petition against NIL STATE PENSION FOR LIFE that is coming with the flat rate pension 2016 to new claimants of women born from 1953 and men born from 1951
https://you.38degrees.org.uk/petitions/state-pension-at-60-now
Informs that as his retirement age is now 68 and he is on Universal Credit, and his wife is
5 years younger then him, he has been told that he will not get the payout of his state pension til he is 73.
So much of the state pension small print gives people NIL or far less than the already lowest state pension of all rich nations bar poor Mexico, that the flat rate is more about withering away or abolishing the state pension.
Labour is targetting Nick Clegg’s Sheffield seat.
If Labour did a u-turn and put in Labour’s 2015 manifesto repealing the Coalition’s Pension Bills 2010-2014 (includes the flat rate pension 2016 brought in by Pension Bill 2014) and paid out the state pension denied women from 2013 and equalised the state pension for men at 60 in 2015, then Labour would get a majority government and win Sheffield with a landslide victory.
Because it costs nothing to pay out the state pension, as it sits unused and unable to be spent on anything else since 2013 in the National Insurance Fund and wrong called a surplus by the Coalition and an old Labour member, John Prescott, who has been too long out of government and has forgotten that the NI Fund is the source of the state pension.
https://you.38degrees.org.uk/petitions/state-pension-at-60-now
pathetic 666
I know this is old but they told me about it at my interview.
Fiona Gregory
Yes, even murderers and rapists get shelter and 3 meals a day. What example does that set?
Fiona Gregory
I might emigrate to Ireland to be sure.
Fiona Gregory
They won’t have enough prison space to jail all of us.