Getting very sick of Tory claims that Universal Credit advance payments solve the serious financial problems caused by the mandatory six weeks (it’s often longer) that people must wait for their first Universal Credit payment. This claim is a total fudge.
Let’s say this loud and clear: Universal Credit advance payments are LOANS. They must be repaid (you can read full details of the Universal Credit advance payment system on the CAB site). They’re not much-needed extras. They’re advances on people’s Universal Credit money and must be repaid out of people’s benefits.
That means that the DWP claws the money back when people’s Universal Credit claims are up and running. The DWP deducts advance payment loan money from people’s benefits at source. Those deductions mean that for months, people who were already in hardship (people who receive advance payments are in hardship by definition) get a smaller Universal Credit payment than they were expecting.
I’ve posted an example at the top of this article – an advance payment deduction notice from the Universal Credit journal of a Croydon/Colchester claimant I wrote about yesterday.
There’s another issue. The DWP makes mistakes with repayment totals – mistakes which cause people a great deal of stress and which they must try and sort out using Universal Credit’s unreliable online systems. For example: the woman who is paying back the advance payment in the notice above got a notice in her Universal Credit journal this year which said the DWP would deduct £528 that month. You can imagine how she felt when she saw that notice in her online account. She wasn’t even liable for payments listed in the notice:
When this sort of thing happens, people must spend ages on the phone to the DWP and online trying to sort the problem out – and trying to make sure, in this case, that the Universal Credit payment that month wasn’t £528 short. That deduction would have been a disaster. People who struggle to use online systems have no chance at all when these many mistakes happen. I’ve written in detail about problems JSA and Income Support claimants had and still have with DWP loan deductions. Some deductions put people in real hardship.
Let’s not forget either that often people who need advance Universal Credit payments already have other debts because of extra costs heaped on them by welfare reform – council tax debts and court costs, rent arrears and plenty more. The young woman in yesterday’s article had serious council tax and court debts, and tax credit repayment demands in the past two years. A deduction for a Universal Credit advance payment loan quickly becomes just another debt problem. Advance payments don’t solve problems caused by that six (and more) weeks that Universal Credit claimants must endure with no money.
All a Universal Credit advance payment does is push shortfall problems back for a short time – ie, until after Tory party conference is over and attention has moved from Universal Credit.
Does my head in, this. Just pay people their Universal Credit entitlement from the day they make their claim and be done with it. Any other so-called “fix” is garbage.
Thank you for drawing peoples attention to this. Another nightmarish aspect to the whole deal. Every time I think about Universal Credit I get a sick feeling in my stomach and it’s not even due in my area until July ’19.
I don’t know how they expect people to be able to live. It just goes to show how absolutely out of touch the Tories really are. They live in a different world to us and do not have a clue.
Everything is re-payable on Universal Credit, it all goes back to the ideas of control and dominance of claimants .
If people get sanctioned on Universal Credit they can claim Hardship Benefit, but this too is now a repayable loan. So claimants are paying for their own punishment as it were. Even the sick, the terminally-ill and the disabled.
The Tories must be laughing all the way to the foodbank.
And where are Labour in this ? You might as well call on Jesus Christ as Jeremy Corbyn.
Oh but I DO call upon Jesus Christ! I always pray for help & protection before I have to sign-on, I pray before setting off & on the way there, then again just beforeentering the Jobcentre. That’s how nervous, anxious, & frightened I am. Visits to the Jobcentre are the most stressful thing in my life. Poverty & social exclusion is also stressful but I can putup with that, if the Jobcentre would just fuck off & leave me alone.
Just found out today that I have to attend some sort of group session at the Jobcentre next week, which involves sittingin a small room with several other claimants whilst being lectured about getting a job. Needless to say I am dreading it.
I feel for you Trev , Hopefully this new expansion will flood the job centres with new UC credit claimants and the dam will burst.
I feel for you Trev , Hopefully this new expansion will flood the job centres with new UC claimants and the dam will burst.
Scum they are, taking pleasure in making people apply for jobs they are totally unsuitable for, and sanctioning them if they don’t.
I beat them to it, and apply for those bad jobs first.
I showed the job clerk my application confirmation for KFC . He looked annoyed as I has removed his fun, but then tried a different tack, he smillled, shook his head and said quietly, in a very matey voice: ” you don’t want to work there do you..’
At which point i’m supposed to say, well no not really, I’d only end up punching the chav customers.
When he would sanction me for applying for jobs I had no intention of actually starting..
But I’m wise to their crap, so I hit him with one of their ( 100% unproven) cliches, I replied : ” yes, because it’s easier to get a job when you have a job”
At which point he gave up.
Never let your guard down with them.
Yes you have to be careful what you say to the bloody dole clerks aka Adviser aka “Work Coach”. Stay one step ahead of the game, apply for stuff they can’t knock you for, and in most cases they won’t give you the damned job anyway, ‘cos your too old, or don’t drive, or don’t have FLT experience etc.etc.
They will either take the Lump sum off the first payment or £11.10 each week for a repayment plan, that’s roughly just under £48 if they use a daily amount of £1.58 (£11.06 or £11.13 if they claim it back at £1.59 daily rate)
Those on UC will get 12 payments covering 28,30 or 31 days. Even landlords say per calander month and not a daily rate when they set the rents, even councils who charge 48 weeks with 4 free weeks account for the 4 free weeks by charging for those 28 days by making tenents pay that bit more each week or month to cover the free weeks. Say rent is £100 a wek with 4 free weeks throughout the year, then £8.34 would be for the free week the rest would be the weekly rent.
I reached the same conclusion in this post from seven months ago: https://twishort.com/KTHlc. I report voluntarily to the UN and strongly advise that you e-mail your superlative blog post to Labour MPs; they need to be informed that advanced payments must be repaid under Universal Credit, and that benefit claimants will surely spiral into debt. I’m also predicting an exponential increase in suicides as a result.
I’ll ask the Guardian newspaper to highlight this issue. I’ll contact Dr. Francis Ryan, their columnist on disability issues.
Frances Ryan will try to publicize this issue in the Guardian. Here’s her Twitter response: https://twitter.com/DrFrancesRyan/status/914896495622721538.
Thanks for the claifying input about the loans that I immediately sent blog post alert of to my sister, Kate.
I believe it should also be pointed out that while awaiting first payment of Universal Credit, claimant’s progress-chasing phone calls to the DWP are also draining of finance and life-blood. In addition there is the matter of jobcentre closures.
Terra firma benefits services closures leave the economically vulnerable more firmly in the lurch. As the date of the Guardian cartoon reproduced on my blog post about jobcentre closures makes plain, issues regarding ‘help line’ charges have been around since at least 2003!
Meanwhile, in Hereford, a ‘1-stop-shop’ is replacing the Jobcentre and council service offices. You have told me that such places tend to lack privacy. It strikes me that the spacial congestion that implies, combined with the desperation that Universal Credit processes put people through, could render them liable sites for riots.
I’d be interested in seeing the Hereford One Stop operation. The One Stop shop in Basildon was the one we talked about and that really stood out – council services (incl housing and homelessness), triage and jobcentre all in one enormous room.
Is that ‘claims processing’ or ‘claimant processing’?
Anyhow, re prospect of your seeing the new Hereford One Stop Shop, I am beginning a relationship with Worcester office (ca 30 miles from Hereford) of Unite the Union Community Section. They are attempting to get activists out to Wyre Forest Jobcentre, and I am suggesting to Branch Secretary that it would be great to have you along both there and at Hereford’s news ‘one stop shop’.
For such standing outside operations, strength of numbers can be a great ‘ice-breaker’ in itself, while placards can also be great.
Ha har I’m loving it .
I’ve been suffering UC for a year or two, but only now that the families, foreign nationals, and disabled (including fake disabled) are being affected is the media starting to take notice…
Maybe now something will change now !!
I see the Tories are getting clobbered here, but when will you lot learn- they all as bad .
Nasty Labour government forced me on the 13 week, full time, Work Program and I was no fixed address at the time.
And pushed many young people into mandatory ‘voluntary’ work – stocking shelves in Poundland etc.
I love this headline from Labours flagship rag media, the Daily Mirror:
”Universal Credit families to get ‘advance cash payments’ to stop them falling into debt”
http://www.mirror.co.uk/money/universal-credit-claimants-advance-cash-11279763
bahahahaha, MINT!!
We will lend you money to Stop you getting into debt…
What a useless news outlet, I tried to block them on Google News, but it was no go
The advanced payments is not even new, so no concession, I got one ages ago, and had to pay it back over 6 months.
Things have to get worse before UC collapses
So more new claimants is super news .
Yes, the old ‘New Deal’ under New Labour was 13 weeks of hell, underpinned by threat of Sanctions. I think I got sent on New Deal about 4 or 5 times, completed it 3 times, & the so-called work placements were a (bad) joke. It was a long time before I voted Labour again after that. Hopefully Corbyn might be better, & faced with this current lot of evil Tory bastards, Labour are our only hope.
At least though on New Deal you got an extra tenner a week + bus fares were paid in cash so you could walk it & claim about £14 a week in bus fares! I remember having to do some other shit too, had to sit in a classroom for 2 weeks prior to New Deal, doing “team building” exercises, crossword puzzles & sellotaping eggs to balloons & throwing them out the window. Wtf that was supposed to prove I have no idea, but it was mandatory at the time. What a load of fucking shite.
I can imagine DWP propagandists ‘licking their lips’ at the prospect of paraphrasing Eddie:
“Full, nationwide roll-out of Universal Credit is the best thing that could possibly happen to this country.” — Eddie Booth, existing Universal Credit claimant
Pingback: Universal credit and tax credit debt collection… wtf is going on here. My god | Kate Belgrave
Maybe, taking a lead from Naomi Klein’s book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, there could be a Twitter hash-tag
#UC-Advances-DisasterCapitalism
?
New placard design:
Universal Credit’s long waits and short-term-benefits-advance [S.T.B.A.] stab-in-the-back debt slavery
There r taking £75 a month I’ve got nothing to live on I’m so upset I was on esa then I moved into a area were the cu is I keep crying
I just got on this terrible universal credit o was on esa that stop I suffer from depression it has gone woast since this devil benefit my rent not getting paid then they say over pay you want is going I am 59 years old work most of my life this benefit has male a lor of people homeless way do we go for help
They are taking £92 a month off mine. I am also now a month behind on my rent. I have had debt collectors knocking at my door as I have now fallen behind with payments. It’s depressing and worrying.
At last ! I only just signed in to UC in January and I’m screaming the same thing !! I’m not even in a UC area I was on the old tax credit system …got made redundant at Christmas so went to sign on while searching for work (the nearest and only option job centre was in a UC area) so …you guessed it they stopped EVERYTHING I was on overnight !! Housing, tax credits and made me apply so I HAD to take the loan as I’m in privately rented with no hope of getting anywhere else! I thought as you I’d be paid to the day I started the claim and then clear the loan but NO it’s all forgotten …I’ve basically been screwed out of 5 weeks money , I’m paying 110. Pound a month for a year out of my payment AND to add insult to injury the tax credit office and universal credit office HAVE NO IDEA what the other is doing !? Tax credits billed me for a 300 pound over payment !??? Like when was that? It stopped overnight and I got no money for 5 weeks ???? But yep ….add it to my loan debt , so I’m now worse off than when I was on tax credits (payments less ?) Plus 1550. In debth I didn’t have! …the government are saving the total benefit amount for up to 6 weeks on EVERY single person transferred onto UC……work that out ….it’s millions !! Plus look up how to get the nhs exemption on UC ….it’s a joke too ….all it was invented for was to overhaul the system across the board to cut every area of welfare ….luckily for me it’s a temp (marriage break up getting back on my feet time ) I’ll be glad to get off this bus and self fund myself asap !