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Forum Home  →  Discussion  →  Universal credit administration  →  Thread

UC and UJM -sanction ready to appeal

Andrew Dutton
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Welfare rights service - Derbyshire County Council

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Total Posts: 1955

Joined: 12 October 2012

See also http://www.rightsnet.org.uk/forums/viewthread/8777/

I have a claimant who has been sanctioned on UC for not doing sufficient job-search. Part of the argument is that UC say he did not keep sufficiently thorough records of how much time he spent on job-search activities (we’ll see about that) but my key beef is this - an MR has come back refusing to change the decision because:

‘He was advised that although he used other sites and applied in person…his Claimant Commitment specifies that he uses Universal Jobmatch’

In response to my demand that they specify the jobs they have claimed he missed on UJ, the decision reads,
‘It is not possible to specify which jobs would have been available on UJ for the period in question, I have contacted the work coach but received no reply’.

If it’s in the CC, does this mean one must, on pain of sanction, use UJM even if one can do more and better job search on other sites??? I’ve made the point elsewhere that UJM simply copies details from other sites; it has very little other content. (Today, for instance, it’s mainly copying the content of Thistle Recruitment and Jobs4.co.uk)

And can a DM make a decision on jobs someone has missed out on without knowing what they are, or whether he looked at the same jobs on other sites?

Hmmmmmmmmmmm!

chacha
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Benefits dept - Hertsmere Borough Council

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Andrew Dutton - 04 February 2016 03:33 PM

If it’s in the CC, does this mean one must, on pain of sanction, use UJM even if one can do more and better job search on other sites???

Of course not, but we know what the current stance is (They really ought to take off the blinkers or specsavers) the unfortunate thing, still, is that claimant’s will have to go through this until a DM or a Judge says otherwise!!!!!!

Carol Laidlaw
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Oldham Citizens Advice Bureau

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Joined: 20 June 2013

I am currently working on 2 UC sanctions appeals for the same client. I find there is only one Upper Tribunal decision on UC (and it is not relevant to my client’s circumstances) so I am looking at UT decisions for jobseekers allowance; my client is looking for work and so is under the same conditions as a person on JSA. the problem I am seeing though is that while regulation 19 of the JSA regulations and its subparagraphs put certain boundaries on what directions and requirements job centre staff can impose on job seekers, there are no such boundaries in the UC regulations. I need to look at them again just in case I have missed anything, but the UC regulations seem to have nothing corresponding to clauses in the JSA regulations that say, for example, a job seekers direction must be designed to improve the claimants chances of finding work, and must be tailored for their individual circumstances.
This is very worrying because it is looking like job centre staff can impose anything they like on UC claimants, whether reasonable or useful or not.
Does anyone else have a view on this? Have I got the wrong interpretation of the UC regs?