Response from UC Engagement Team

I received the following response from the UC Engagement Team dated 24/5/2024…

Hello Mr Johnson,

Thank you for your email dated 17th April 2024 about the update on preparing to start the managed migration of housing benefit households. Firstly, can I apologise for the time it has taken to respond to your query. I have liaised with my colleagues to source answers to your questions, which are:


Enhanced Customer Support: Agents will call the claimant up to three times, on different days. The purpose of these calls is for agents to check that the claimant has received the Migration Notice and will establish whether they are planning to claim and if they have access to any support needed to do so. Where the claimant needs additional support, the agent will direct them as appropriate. This may include providing information about Citizen’s Advice and the ‘Help to Claim’ service, explaining how to make a telephone claim, making a referral for a home visit, or signposting the claimant to the Jobcentre. The prompts for the agents to make these calls are automatically triggered.

For Income Support claimants, system checks will take place where there is no contact with the claimant via the phone calls. These checks will look for evidence of additional support needs. Where there is evidence found, the claimant will be referred for a home visit. For ESA claimants, no system checks are required – they are automatically treated as having additional support needs and will be referred for a home visit.

Migration Notice cancellation and transitional protection: Thank you for bringing this to our attention. We have reviewed the content of the pack and will be updating this to read: “Customers must understand that if the Migration Notice is cancelled, should they make a claim to Universal Credit in the future, and no further Migration Notice has been issued, they will not receive any transitional protection. This means they might not receive the same amount of money or might not be entitled at all. ” (Emphasis might). Just for clarification - cancelling the Migration Notice (MN) puts the claimant back into a position where we’re treating them as never having had a MN at all. So - like anyone else who hasn’t had one - they’re not entitled to transitional protection (TP) at that point. Then, when we issue the replacement MN, that puts them back into the MtUC process and gives them access to TP in the same way as someone receiving their first ever MN.

Time needed to boost Legacy benefits in order to boost UC transitional protection: The claimants all have a minimum of three months in which to make their claim to UC. If for example a claimant has a pending PIP claim or appeal and are later awarded an additional component of benefit which is backdated to before their UC claim date, the transitional protection would be recalculated where appropriate. 

I hope these responses are helpful. Please contact our Stakeholder Engagement Inbox .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)) if you have any further queries.

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Concerning the jeopardy of obtaining a cancellation but then re-claiming UC without the protection of a Migration Notice, this emphasises a point I think Charles made a while ago along the lines of that we may end up pursuing the DWP for a request for a Migration Notice in order to get TP later. It would not take much imagination for the DWP to simply decide to turn off Legacy benefits without the facility of a Migration Notice.

In relation to ‘Income Maximisation’ based refusals of cancellations and extensions and so on, it appears that the need for time to build PIP into Legacy before migration is brushed aside on the basis of rescue via regulation 62… clearly most claimants will not be aware of the need to lodge ‘applications’ and so on.

Hope this stuff helps a bit,

Steve

Thanks very much Steve. Yes, it is helpful.

Like many of us I’m concerned about whether many of these vulnerable claimants will answer the phone and, if they do, how they are likely to react.  Local CABx have asked me whether the ‘agents’ involved in enhanced customer support will be based locally in Jobcentres (which might enable advisers to liaise and support claimants more easily and mitigate inevitable trust issues) or whether they will be centrally based in a migration team - my assumption was the latter unfortunately. Do you agree?