32% of Tax Credit claimants lose in DWP switch

  • Post last modified:August 14, 2024
  • Reading time:6 mins read


The Canary has been writing about the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) stripping people of their benefits when it forces them onto Universal Credit for nearly a year. When we first reported about in, on 21 August 2023, we calculated 24% of people lost their entitlements – most of those on Tax Credits. At the time, the DWP poo-pooed the idea. Now, we know that the Canary was correct – as over a quarter of a million people, mostly women, have lost their benefits.

Universal Credit: managed migration disaster

The DWP began rolling out managed migration in July 2019, as a pilot scheme. This is where the department forces people who have not yet moved to Universal Credit, either voluntarily or because of a change of circumstance, onto it. This is because the new benefit is replacing old ones like Tax Credits.

Then, the coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic hit, so the DWP had to pause its work on managed migration. In June 2022, it said that it was aiming to get everyone on old benefits onto Universal Credit by 2024.

The DWP started writing to people in July 2022. It sent them “migration notices”, telling them they needed to move to Universal Credit. In August 2023, the Canary crunched the first set of figures the DWP released around this.

We found that, at the time,

  • 82% of all managed migration claimants were women, nearly all of whom were previously claiming tax credits.
  • 24% of people’s claims were closed, presumably leaving them with no benefits at all.
  • Of these, around 79% were women.

The DWP issued a caveat with these figures. It said on its website:

It should be noted that claimants who have been sent an MN to date will not be representative of the complete population who will be sent an MN.

In particular, the vast majority so far have been single TC [tax credits] households whose likelihood of claiming UC… may be different to couple TC households and/or DWP legacy benefit claimants, the majority of whom have not yet been sent a migration notice.

The DWP knew this would happen but lied

At the time, the Canary asked the DWP for comment. It originally gave us a statement for publication, but then retracted it. We have decided to publish it in full now. A DWP spokesperson told us in August 2023:

We are committed to helping everyone transition to Universal Credit as smoothly as possible and evidence to date shows that Tax Credit claimants have generally been able to navigate the Universal Credit system to make a new claim with minimal support. We will only stop someone’s benefits as a last resort and only after multiple unsuccessful attempts to engage with claimants by phone and post.

For anyone who doesn’t claim by their deadline, there is a one-month ‘grace period’ following benefit termination. During this period, any claim to Universal Credit is backdated and transitional protection can still be awarded where required.

the DWP may well have retracted this because it knew there was a problem – but in its comment it was effectively saying there wasn’t.

Fast-forward to August 2024 and not only is the DWP’s previous statement no demonstrably false, but suddenly politicians and the corporate media are outraged:

Universal Credit: systemic misogyny over Tax Credits

This is because the data the Canary crunched a year ago has remained roughly correct. On 13 August the DWP issued the latest data on managed migration. It said that:

  • 1,140,810 people had been sent managed migration notices from July 2022 to June 2024.
  • 284,660 people had lost their benefits (24.9%).
  • 165,720 were women (58.2%).
  • 99% were Tax Credits claimants – and of those, 32% of the total number of Tax Credits claimants lost their benefits.

So, when the DWP told the Canary in August 2023 that “tax credit claimants have generally been able to navigate” managed migration to “make a new claim” – this is not true, as nearly a third of them lost their benefits.

All this comes just as, as the Canary’s Rachel Charlton-Dailey just wrote:

This week marks a year since the EHRC ruled the DWP and the British government had failed to implement any of the recommendations in the UNCRDP 2016 report.

The Canary is not happy crowing ‘we told you so’. However, if people had actually listened and acted at the time, then maybe managed migration could have been paused. And it should have been.

There is clearly a systemic (and misogynistic) issue with Universal Credit managed migration – as many people predicted there would be, and have been warning for year about. The DWP and the Labour government needs to pause the roll out now, reverse previous people’s migration, and work out how the hell to fix this almighty mess.

Featured image via the Canary





Source link

Tags: , , , , , , ,