Dear Editor,
Universal credit is a Tory initiative to bring together a number of benefits paid at different intervals into one monthly payment. It is currently being trialled in our area for single people made unemployed and single people previously claiming sickness benefit, found fit for work by the Department for Work and Pensions. I have advocated for a significant number of people on our town bewildered by the the complexity of the new benefit, and found a number of injustices built into the new universal credit system for single people.
Where unemployed people previously waited two weeks for their first payment of jobseeker’s allowance, those forced onto universal credit typically wait 8 weeks to receive their first payment. And in the interim, the claimant must supply proof of earnings and other information to multiple agencies, mediate between those agencies to tie their benefits together into one package, and speak to representatives of those agencies who are just as bewildered by the universal credit system as the claimant themselves.
The intention of universal credit was to make it easier in a climate of decreasing job security, for people working zero hours contracts and short periods of temporary work to top up their earnings with in work benefits. But the amount of earned income the claimant can keep has been whittled away under universal credit. One worker, who works one week in every four, who would previously be entitled to full unemployment premiums for every other week out of work claiming jobseeker’s allowance, now finds that, the one week he does work is taken into consideration for the full month, and 80% of his earned income in deducted from his monthly universal credit. Another worker, received a letter from the Department of Work and Pensions stating that, the first £110 he earned in any month would be his to keep. This encouraged him to accept the few hours of work per month he was offered by an employer, only to find that, the disregard doesn’t apply to single people, and he keeps nothing of his earnings.
I’ve spoken to a number of people claiming jobseeker’s allowance who now cannot afford to sign off and take a temporary job, because when that job ends, they cannot afford to survive for 8 weeks while their universal credit claim is processed. And thereafter, unless they secure full time work, casual and part time workers will see 80% of their earnings in any given month taken towards in work benefits. Equally, vulnerable and marginalised people who are less able to represent themselves on the telephone or in writing, give up trying to communicate with the relevant agencies who have no more understanding of universal credit than they do.
It is of no surprise that a Tory government would implement a system that further demonizes and berates the poor into insecure work of increasingly dwindling hours and wages, rather than invest in full time jobs for decent pay. But, given their mantra of ‘make work pay’, they’ve shot themselves in the foot by making the poorest workers even poorer still. Universal credit was the brain child of Ian Duncan Smith, he resigned after he could no longer daily defend the shame of this unjust strategy, but I don’t imagine that he’s had to spend 8 weeks using foodbanks while he waits for his first payment from the system he inaugurated.
Warren Saunders