Actually, Neil – the Universal Credit “system” for self employed people and variable incomes is shite

To twitter, then! – where Universal Credit director general Neil Couling (or the hapless minion who runs Neil’s twitter account) tells me that Universal Credit works brilliantly for people whose incomes vary.

People who are self-employed often earn different amounts from month to month. They must report their earnings each month. The DWP is meant to adjust their Universal Credit entitlements accordingly and pay people the Universal Credit that they’re owed.

Neil seems to think that this actually happens.

I’d asked twitter what should happen to a Universal Credit claim if people made money one month, but not much in the next two (I was trying to understand if Universal Credit claims stopped if people earned over certain amounts):


Said the great man in response:

“Light touch, simple and quick” – like a 2 in 1 shampoo! Sounded absolutely fantastic.

Pity it’s tripe.

I say it is tripe, because I keep meeting self-employed people outside the jobcentre who tell me that trying to claim Universal Credit while on a variable income is a nightmare – a nightmare that they’ve given up trying to wake from.

They say that the DWP can’t calculate their entitlements correctly and/or never pay their Universal Credit entitlements on time. In fact, this was the reason that I asked twitter about Universal Credit and variable incomes in the first place. I was trying to work out wtf was meant to happen, so that I could compare that with the shambles that was actually happening.

In February, for example, I posted a discussion with a woman outside Stockport jobcentre who said that trying to claim her family’s Universal Credit entitlements each month was “a nightmare.”

She said that her self-employed husband declared his earnings to the DWP each month as instructed. The DWP had not once managed to calculate the amount of Universal Credit that the family was owed and pay the money on time.

She was not happy about this. At all:

“They [the DWP] never pay us on time… Me husband works for himself, so his earnings are up and down at the moment, so we have to declare them every month…even when he’s declared his earnings, they suspend our account, we still haven’t got paid a week later and then we still have to ring up [the DWP]…

“He declares them [his earnings] on the 16th of every month, because the payday is the 23rd. He declares them, which reopens our account, but then a week later, we should get paid – on the 23rd – but every month when it gets to the 23rd, we’re never paid, so I have to wait 40 minutes by ringing them up and getting through to them… and I’ve got a three year old and a two year old as well as the baby and it’s a nightmare.”

So, there was that.

Then about a fortnight ago, I spoke at length with Dave (named changed) outside Stockport jobcentre at a Stockport United Against Austerity leafleting session.

Dave was a self-employed builder whose earnings varied from month to month.

Dave said that his move from tax credits to Universal Credit last year had been a total disaster.

Dave’s income from his building and plastering work fluctuated considerably because he worked some weeks and not others. It all depended when the work came in.

Dave said that the DWP had consistently failed to adjust his Universal Credit entitlements to factor in his income. He went months without Universal Credit payments last year. His claim stopped and started. He couldn’t understand what was supposed to happen.

Dave said that he had run up thousands of pounds in debt and rent arrears – and that he was still paying back the rent arrears.

Dave said:

“I’m a builder, so there was a pause in my payments. So, I’d maybe do a plastering job this week and then not one for a week, but because the government has said you’re got to work 39 hours a week, I wasn’t entitled to it [Universal Credit].

(NB: I think Dave was referring to the 30 hours a week threshold for working tax credits here, rather than earnings thresholds for UC – but this confusion between requirements for tax credits and UC is the point. People can find the move between the two systems and their different requirements hard to grasp. They can get into deep financial bother while they try to navigate the transition. Rent arrears are a particular threat. Doesn’t bode well for a mass migration of tax credit claimants to Universal Credit).

“Then, they wanted the money back. Then they stopped my money. Then they didn’t pay my rent… and then they wanted that money back as well, so I ended up in a right old ….

“I ended up in in arrears – still paying that back now. Never got paid off tax credits for that year, no money… that rent for a year…”

and:

“…I finished a plastering job for two weeks. I had to wait for another job to come in, so that was a one week gap and I wasn’t entitled to it any more… I wouldn’t mind, but I’ve done it for about 20 years, 15 years and the only debt… so if it had gone a bit further…”

Etc.

You see my point.

I go to jobcentres and find self employed people who are reeling around outside trying to pin down income and information about claiming Universal Credit alongside a variable self employed income. It really doesn’t matter what is supposed to happen. It’s clearly not happening for them. People are not getting the information, support and income that they need.

Then I go onto twitter and find the great and the good telling me that the system is “light touch, simple and quick.”

I can only imagine that there are two Universal Credit systems – the one that Neil and Amber Rudd have on their laptops, and the one that people in the real world must use. Or maybe the twilight zone is an actual thing. I often feel that twitter is most of the way to outer space.

50 thoughts on “Actually, Neil – the Universal Credit “system” for self employed people and variable incomes is shite

  1. Anyone who pretends that any aspect of Universal Credit is actually functioning must be deluded and obviously not in the position of having to use the system themselves.

  2. I return to a 2006 report from a different Neil — Neil Bateman. Jobcentre Plus: Poor service continues.

    Of course, at the time, government was far more interested in ‘targeting [claimants as] benefit thieves’ than ‘Light touch — simple and quick’, while national MainStream Media did not want to know. Benefit claimants require firmer safeguards, not tougher sanctions.

    Neil Bateman e-mailed me in May 2018: “I stopped writing for Community Care after it went online. We lost a voice against injustice when that happened.”

    I’m glad we’ve found you, Kate!

      • Community Care magazine used to be owned by the same publishing company that ran The Lancet etc. — and the DSEI arms fairs. Pressure from medics etc. led their publisher to ditch DSEI. Post-2010 UK government policy seems to have impacted on the policies of that publisher that came to be known as RELX: ‘service user voice’ blogs in Community Care were deleted from Community Care online archives, and RELX went into launching the MIPIM property fairs instead — profiting from homelessness, rather than reporting its nastiness.

        I’m really glad that I had the foresight when I was Kilburn Unemployed Workers Group blog controller to republish a Bob Holman Community Care blog post from 2006 with my preface and updated title. The Apartheid of Wealth State We’re In. The pull-quote from that piece is perhaps more fitting now than it was then: “The affluent elite tell the government about poverty. Those who endure it are shoved aside.”

        Now, however, perhaps with the ‘machine learning’ surveillance inherent in UC claimants’ online accounts, those who endure poverty are written off or sanctioned more than “shoved aside”?

  3. My partner gets the same wage week in week out so we should get the same amount every month well we don’t the brains behind universal credit has changed the calendar surely it should be done mth to mth if it’s a monthly payment but it depends on how many times you get paid my partner is paid weekly and it takes the day you get paid as week 1 so you end up so they say with a 5 week mth instead of a 4week mth the whole universal credit system is a joke no one knows what’s going on with it properly including those that work for the DWP it’s an absolute joke and unless you are unfortunate enough to have to claim it you have no idea of how bad it really is I have been pushed to the limit it’s had a detrimental effect on my health we literally rob Peter to pay Paul and we are nowhere near as bad as a lot of people this god forsaken benefit has and still is killing people

    • It’s a similar situation with rent payments. With some local authorities they set their rent payments at every four weeks rather than monthly, so every so often there is a year where there are thirteen payments rather than the usual twelve. Of course, UC isn’t set up to cope with this, as the bright spark who thought it up must have been the same person that was adamant that everyone was paid monthly when there are still a heck of a lot of people who are paid weekly or fortnightly in cash.

      • The same bright spark who thinks that Benefit Sanctions automatically improve peoples’ employability, and that upon being Sanctioned they will immediately find a job, a thought continuously echoed by many Tories in spite of evidence to the contrary.

  4. I have a name for DWP and it isn’t WORK and PENSIONS it’s W*NKERS and PARASITES. They make claimants worse off it’s like if you earn £500 in one week they average it out over the month then decide how much the claimant can have on top.

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    • I was with Interserve when I was sentenced to Workfare, but my experience was pretty much okay as I ensured that I served them with a ‘withdrawal of consent’ letter, (I actually served it at the Jobcentre at the initial pre-Workafare interview, and that stalled being put on Workfare for nearly a year) and I insisted that they found me a Workfare advisor who spoke Welsh… They did eventually find someone who agreed to be my advisor, despite their not having spoken Welsh since leaving school, and once we’d overcome some initial ‘awkwardness’ we got along fine, and soon I was only visiting once a month, rather than every fortnight, as there wasn’t much they could do with me witholding consent for sharing my details with third parties. Eventually he was rumbled by his boss, and had to re-instate fortnightly appointments, but we ended up chatting about the iniquities of the system, how Interserve was full of grasping selfish people whose only interest was personal career progression, and how he was sorry that he hadn’t met me five years earlier when he could have sent me on some worthwhile courses. I got to understand what a nasty working environment existed at Interserve, and I think the Welsh language element made quite a bit of difference, in that it added a subversive element. Eventually he found a different job, and the bastards tried to fob me off with a new advisor who only spoke English. I challenged this, and they found another advisor willing to see me, but he was based in another office in another town a rail journey away – which Interserve would pay for. It turned out that the advisor was another person who’d had a Welsh medium education, but who had subsequently not spoken the language, and had entirely lost confidence in his ability to speak Welsh, (might sound a bit weird, but this experience is common in S.E. Wales) but understood everything. So proceedings in that office probably sounded a bit odd at times, with me speaking Welsh and him answering in English!

      I don’t know, but that office had an atmosphere that somehow it had escaped notice, and that it was being run by human beings who were all really nice, unlike the central Cardiff office. But then I guess it was staffed by local people who were fully aware of the reality of the world of work, the total lack of jobs, even crap ones, and how unfair the system was becoming.

      In general though, these ‘providers’ just wasted huge amounts of public money, and whilst I couldn’t really fault either of the people I had as personal advisors, as they were both genuine human beings who never once tried to threaten me with anything, Workfare shouldn’t ever have existed. Now of course, it’s been ’embedded’ into Universal Credit, and as we’re all still getting used to the intricacies of UC, it will take a while for strategies to develop against that element of UC. I’m aware that Boycott Workfare are working on ways of fighting UC, and look forward to stuff that they put out. I would suspect that even though the Workfare element may have been embedding in UC that it will still be farmed out to private sector agencies for implementation and administration, (the DWP simply not having the resources to do this) so I would think that a withdrawal of consent notice would still be a very effective spanner in the works, as if anything, GPDR gives us even more clout over how our personal information is used. Also, I’d suggest that close scrutiny of things like Employer’s Liability Insurance could provide way of combating Workfare as people forced to work on these schemes for no pay are not employees, and are not volunteers either, which was a common scam by charities such as the Starvation Army.

      • I had the misfortune to attend Interserve both at Bradford and Huddersfield, and both were shite, ranging from incompetent, inept, inappropriate and condescending to oppressive, bullying and downright cunts. A plague on them.

  7. Goodbye Working Links
    And good riddance too !
    Thank God the poor claimants
    Are at last rid of you

    Gone bust at the end
    Despite the millions you’ve had
    All your schemes and your greed
    It’s all gone bad

    No more snout in the trough of the welfare cash
    No more guzzling wine at the ERSA bash
    No more slick suits and bullshit
    You’ve had your day
    Take your crap orange signs and just go away !

  8. What exactly is Corbyn doing ? He doesn’t back a second referendum, but he wants a ‘Peoples Vote’. What’s a referendum then if it’s not a Peoples Vote ?
    This is just ridiculous. No wonder people are deserting him in droves, and Tom Watson seems to be running his own party.
    # DangerousHero

      • That’s exactly the kind of thoughts I had when I first read about Bright Blue sometime last week. Out of touch, as instanced by their backwards thinking over the five week wait for an initial payment. How on earth is a sum amounting to 25% of the initial payment, paid as a ‘helping hand’ at the start of a claim going to make that much of a difference? Surely if there is an issue with the five week wait, (and evidence strongly suggests this) then surely making the wait two weeks would be in order, with the safeguard that an emergency grant can be paid in extreme circumstances?

        Given that it seems likely that any incoming Labour government would do something about the shambles that is UC we need to be certain that they know the kind of things we want. UC has been likened to the Poll Tax, and if that is the case, we need to learn something from that, and ensure that what UC is replaced with is something genuinely different, and not some kind of rehash, as Council Tax was.

          • I can remember thinking at the time that the Tory government gave in rather easily, and was dismayed that people accepted Council Tax as an ‘alternative’ as I didn’t think it was really that much different, though it did put an end to those on benefit being required to pay a 20% contribution. I guess that no-one on the opposition side had really thought about what an acceptable alternative would be, and so Council Tax became that compromise. It would have been much better if it had become some form of local income tax, as at least that is progressive. It’s still the case that owners of large houses get away with paying a small amount relative to house size/value and this is also often a far smaller proportion of their income compared to people living in lower value properties. Even as it is, single people are still being ripped off, as the single discount is only 25% and not 50%. In Wales there was a slight adjustment that introduced another Council Tax band at the upper end, but this hasn’t fundamentally changed what is a very unfair system.

            When it comes to UC, we pretty much know what we don’t like about it, but what would we like to see instead? I wouldn’t discount even completely over the top lala land suggestions, as at the very least it would give us a laugh, but I think that most people would suggest schemes that are based on a simple concept of fairness and practicality. But fundamentally I would think that most people would accept that people shouldn’t be starving, cold or homeless due to being unemployed. It’s actually a scandal that homelessness is accepted the way it is. In the mid seventies there might have been a few homeless people, but they were mainly older and there were very few of them.

            Also, I think a re-introduction of ‘make work’ schemes like the much derided Community Programme would be a great idea, as many of us have some considerable reluctance to work in shit jobs that simply enrich the 1%. At the very least the Community Programme provided meaningful work that didn’t undermine anyone else’s job. It also delivered schemes of benefit to the local community – I went on a couple that were run by the local archaeological trust, and they were fascinating, both intrinsically and socially, as well as providing a workforce to do stuff that would otherwise not get done.

          • I’ve mentioned this before, the Community Enterprise Programme (CEP) in 1983 was the only decent work scheme I ever did, you actually got paid a wage, which worked out double the dole at the time, and you didn’t have to sign on and there was no mention of job search. On my scheme I think we worked 4 days per week, some others might have been 3 days, not sure, but it was ok and I got a job out of it that lead to me being in employment throughout the 80s up until 91 when I got made redundant.

          • Yep that sounds slightly more like it. I remember all the work that people on community work placements were doing in 2014 – running events, doing all kinds of admin and db work and still only getting £72 a week for it on standard JSA. Total pisstake by the charities that were involved in that.

          • The schemes I worked on were for 4 days of the week. On one of them it was bizarre. We were working on a site in the north of Ceredigion, and at the time I was living in a village seven miles outside of Carmarthen, so I was riding my motorcycle 20 miles to the pick-up point for the scheme’s mni bus and then travelling a further 40 miles to the site. We’d arrive on site by about 10 in the morning, and then a decision would be made as to whether climatic conditions allowed any work to be done – there was little cover, and the location was a bleak, treeless landscape on the shores of a reservoir serving a hydro-electric scheme. If it was decided that work could be done, we’d then spend the next four hours trying to record, (mainly meaning that we were drawing what were thought to be Bronze Age agricultural terracing) the remains, but a fair bit of that time was also spent chasing one’s drawing board that had been ripped out of ones hands by the prevailing wind, which was often accompanied by horizontal rain. If that wasn’t enough, being scared almost out of ones skin by low flying, contour hugging RAF jets passing very low overhead.; They couldn’t be heard until they were overhead, and I very much doubt that they could have been flying at more than 50 metres altitude, and perhaps even less. The pilots could clearly see us, as they sometimes waggled the wings of their aircraft in acknowledgement, but that was usually when they were coming the other way down the valley. By time 2pm came, it was time to pack up and start on the journey back home, At that time I was used to fairly long commutes, but that was the longest commute I have ever done, 120 mile round trip every working day.

            That scheme came to an abrupt end one Monday morning when we arrived at our work site only to discover that it was half a metre under water. It was a burial site that we were recording with a view to it being moved to a more accessible location so that tourists could gawp at it. The level of the reservoir had been deliberately lowered so that maintenance work could be done, and a drought had lowered it further and exposed abundant archaeological remains that had been hidden under layers of peat. A RCHA/(W) aerial survey had highlighted a large number of new discoveries, and we were sent to record them. however, the weather changed and the level of water in the reservoir raised, covering the site. About a fortnight after this I started in college.

  9. Pingback: I’ve got a job and a chance to earn some money. Hope the DWP doesn’t wreck it | Kate Belgrave

  10. This Universal Credit is a false hope to get support as a self-employed person. We were running our family consultancy business for 5 years now and with the uncertainty, we experience today whether it is due to BREXIT our projects were just not coming in. So we went to apply for UC with my wife, had 4 interviews showed every detail about how the business was performing over the last years. We were notified to be eligible for £498.89 as a couple. We submitted our income-expense form that was about £500 per person. However, the system expects us to have £1144.15 income /person that they use to “calculate” the actual amount we are entitled to. So they added up our virtual income to be £2288.30 (no matter of the actual income), based on which they make a reduction according to the following formula: Every £1.00 you earn in take-home pay reduces your Universal Credit by 63 pence. So they calculate £2288.30 x 0.63 = £1441.63, which is then subtracted from the entitled standard benefit of £489.89.
    So we are entitled to get -£951.74 this month. They paid £0 into our account (luckily they haven’t requested me to pay into the UC).
    There is really a gap in someone’s head to work out such a support system.

  11. I’ve posted a response on his twitter. Reopening my claim every other month involves 3 new trips to the job centre for a new commitments meeting, self employment meeting and work search meeting plus a new allocated workcoach

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