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Has the roll-out slipped again?
[for the DWP the Spending review will mean]:
‘continued roll-out of Universal Credit, extending job search conditionality to a further 1.3 million claimants by 2020-21’
Erm…weren’t they supposed to be moving all existing ‘legacy’ claims over by that date?
Isn’t ‘a further 1.3 million’ rather fewer than that?
Happy to be put right or given better info…
I think it means the additional ones that aren’t jobseekers - eg those with limited capability for work and lone parents with children aged 3 and 4.
Yes, a more sensible colleague just suggested that.
The Chancellor said this yesterday re the extra 1.3 million ...
Was asked:
The Blue Book adds just a little detail to the Chancellor’s announcement of the expansion in social security conditionality. It is estimated that 1.3 million people will be caught up in this. Can the Chancellor say whether he will be dragging the sick and disabled to jobcentres every week?
Responded:
There is additional support for disabled people who want to get into work. There is help for people who have been unemployed for 18 months through our help to work scheme. The additional conditionality that the hon. Gentleman refers to relates to people who are currently on housing benefit but do not face that conditionality. Housing benefit is becoming part of universal credit, so that is one category of people we can extend the conditionality to.
UC is for everyone on HB, a main means-tested DWP benefit, or tax credits. At a conservative (ahem) estimate that’s 8 million households, so who knows?
The Office for Budget Responsibility had this to say yesterday re its revised assumption re UC rollout ...
The latest revision reflects two sources of change:
- DWP has decided to slow the pace of natural migration – pushing the end of what it calls the ‘transition period’ back another six months (broadly in line with the delay factored into our forecasts since December 2014). This reduces the marginal cost of UC between 2016-17 and 2018-19 by reducing the caseload. The latest DWP plan also adds the managed migration of tax credits and ESA claims into 2020-21 (previously they were not assumed to take place within our forecast horizon). That increases costs in 2020-21 since these cases receive transitional protection. The impact of these changes to DWP’s plans is shown on the Treasury’s scorecard since we have judged this to have been a policy decision for the purposes of the welfare cap; and
- we have added our own forecast judgement of a further six-month delay to the managed migration phase of the UC rollout. As usual, we have considered evidence from DWP and the latest assessment of UC rollout by the Major Projects Authority. While this indicates greater confidence in the ‘transition phase’ rollout plan, considerable uncertainty remains over the ‘managed migration’ phase. And of course the transition phase rollout schedule has just been pushed back six months, just a year after the previous delay. Our assumption of a further delay reduces the marginal cost of UC in our forecast as cases are migrated later. In particular, this pushes some of the transitional protection costs associated with the tax credits and ESA claimants beyond the forecast horizon. We consider this a forecasting change for the purposes of the welfare cap.
See para 4.96 @ http://budgetresponsibility.org.uk/pubs/EFO_November__2015.pdf
UC is for everyone on HB
Almost everyone of working age.