The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has quietly pressed ahead with forcing ESA benefit claimants onto Universal Credit. Crucially, it is doing so despite promises to claimants that it would not begin the process before September.
Of course, it is doing so while media and public attention is focused on the upcoming general election. Notably, the DWP’s sudden move sits amid its broader plans to speed up its timetable for the department’s so-called ‘mass migration’ process. This is where the DWP is making claimants on old-style benefits like Tax Credits shift over to Universal Credit.
Vitally, this is despite repeated red flags and warnings about the process that has so far stripped hundreds of thousands of people of their benefits.
Universal Credit roll-out: rush and hush
On 3 June, the DWP sent out “migration notices” to benefit claimants on old-style benefits. The notices inform claimants on these that they must move over to Universal Credit. The DWP gives claimants three months in which to do this. Specifically, the department sent these out to claimants of employment and support allowance (ESA).
As the Disability News Service (DNS) reported:
DWP began sending out so-called “migration notices” to about 500 ESA claimants in Wolverhampton and East Suffolk.
However, as it also pointed out, this was despite the fact that former employment minister Jo Churchill has confirmed:
in a written statement that this extension would not begin until September.
Churchill, who is not standing for re-election as an MP, wrote on 21 May: “Our current planning assumption is that we would begin notifying this group in September 2024, with the aim of notifying everyone to make the move by December 2025.”
As the Canary has previously reported, this is part of the previous government’s revised timetable for its mass roll-out. In particular, we noted that:
Previously, the DWP planned to complete this by 2028. Now, it has brought this forward in a bid to cut costs. In particular, it intends to notify all old-style benefit claimants by December 2025.
Of course, the new timetable raises serious concerns that many claimants could lose out. This is because, to date, the department’s own statistics show it has already been callously denying Universal Credit to tens of thousands of legacy benefit claimants.
Now, the DNS’s report suggests that it is ploughing ahead with this even earlier than it had previously indicated.
Claimants stripped of benefits
So far, the mass migration process has left over 180,000 former claimants without any benefits. The large majority of these – over 99% – have been Tax Credit claimants.
In November, the DWP said that it anticipated 26% of Tax Credit claimants would lose their benefits entirely.
Comparatively, the DWP has forecast this to be much lower for other types of benefits. Specifically, it has predicted that the non-claim rate will sit somewhere round 4% for other old-style benefit claimants. This figure includes ESA, alongside three other forms of benefits the department is phasing out: Housing Benefit, Income Support, and Jobseeker’s Allowance (JSA).
However, the DWP’s forecast for Tax Credits have so far underestimated the numbers of people it would strip of benefits. As the Canary reported in May, so far it stands at 28% of Tax Credit claimants, higher than even its revised prediction from November.
It is not possible to get a full picture of the percentage of the number of old-style claimants the DWP has denied Universal Credit to so far. This is because the department’s statistics do not separate out this information into monthly data. Notably, the DWP’s latest release did not include statistics for ‘closed cases’ in February and March 2024.
As a result, it means that it’s impossible to get an accurate percentage of the rejection rate. However, the data shows that up to the end of January 2024, the DWP has stripped 150 non-Tax Credit claimants of their so-called legacy benefits. This was out of a total 2,620 claimants until the end of March 2024.
It would put this at 5.7% of old-style claimants losing their benefits entirely. Of course, this could be higher, since it does not yet include closed claims for February and March in this figure.
The department’s data shows that as of November 2023 around 1.7 million people were still claiming these four types of old-style benefits in some combination, and that the DWP would eventually force them to claim Universal Credit. Even at the department’s 4% estimation, this could mean 68,000 more claimants will lose their benefits.
ESA claimants as “guinea pigs”
The DWP’s decision to do this under cover of general election campaigning. Notably, due to election impartiality rules, DWP civil servants are unable to comment in detail about the department’s Universal Credit activities. Invariably, this hampers public scrutiny of the DWP’s decision to press ahead with this data gathering exercise.
And according to the DNS, the DWP:
said in an email to “stakeholders”: “The purpose of this activity is to gather more learning to inform our planning for migrating these cohorts at scale in due course, with one of the key learnings we are keen to understand being what proportion of households will require support through the enhanced support journey.”
DWP had asked welfare rights advisers not to share this “operational update” publicly because it was “keen to manage any anxiety for people on ESA and don’t want to give the mistaken impression to people on ESA that we have shifted from our publicly-stated plan to start migrating people from September”.
Given this, Disabled People Against Cuts (DPAC) and Black Triangle Campaign activist Gail Ward told the DNS that the ‘learning activity’ is using claimants as “guinea pigs”.
In other words, the DWP is using them to gather data ahead of its full roll-out. Notably, it is doing this without a full picture of the impacts on claimants. Essentially, the DWP is utilising this to test its process for shifting ESA claimants onto Universal Credit. However, for the people it has forced to participate, it could mean the loss of vital welfare support if things don’t go as the DWP has anticipated.
So far, the department has given little reason to trust its predictions. In April, the House of Commons Committee of Public Accounts said that:
The Department has a limited understanding of why some people do not switch to Universal Credit
Ultimately, without a proper understanding of its failures to date, this exercise could put more vulnerable claimants at risk.
Feature image via Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) – Youtube
