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950,000 new claims
I expect most of you will have seen this https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/apr/01/950000-apply-for-universal-credit-in-two-weeks-of-uk-lockdown
I know our jobs make us frequently exasperated and frustrated with the DWP and our interactions with them. I know too that many people inadvertently switching from legacy benefits to UC now may be worse off in the long run. However at the present time I think we should be grateful to DWP staff for the hard work they are doing. The scale of what is happening is hard to grasp.
I respect the staff within DWP who, despite a glaring lack of training and a toxic culture towards disability and benefit claimants in general, manage both to educate themselves to make well reasoned decisions and to provide a dignified service.
There’s probably a majority of ‘good’ people in DWP, but they presumably had a healthy outlook to begin with, and I would be grateful to them on any given day.
Agreed. I have a go at DWP as an entity on a regular basis, but the vast majority of the staff work hard, though tussling with a frequently crazy system.
I reserve my ire and, satire for that matter, for their overlords, who preen, boast and claim success where there is sometimes precious little.
The UC system has done well to stand up so far (I wouldn’t go so far as to say ‘Brilliantly well’ as was claimed in W&P Committee last week) and I hope we can all work together to get everyone through this unbelievable mess.
It’s a mind boggling volume of claims to be processing and the fact that the digital system seems to be coping is surprising but reassuring.
The work that the DWP staff are doing is incredible quite frankly, as with many other public servants, who have been absolutely hammered by 10 years of austerity and I take my hat off to them.
I reserve my ire and, satire for that matter, for their overlords, who preen, boast and claim success where there is sometimes precious little.
Thanks for that Andrew.