Please hang up now: WRONG WRONG WRONG!

The UC Helpline automated voice is shamefully unlawful in almost everything it utters in its calming tones before giving me the “full-Vivaldi”.

UC Auto-Voice:

“You’ll get your first payment after 5 weeks. If its been less than 5 weeks please hang up now”.

So let’s imagine the not unlikely scenario of a claimant who has had no income for 3 weeks and is just beginning to show the early signs of malnutrition as a result….

In their wisdom the regulations allow for such a person to be given an advance payment of Universal Credit.

But how is our claimant (assuming at this stage they can still afford to ring the helpline in the first place) ever supposed to find that out or get through to them if the UC Auto-Voice tells them when they ring up to plead for a few quid a little bit early that they need to hang up and go and starve quietly?

Could whoever feeds the UC Auto-Voice chap his lines at the DWP perhaps check that the nonsense he is told to say doesn’t cause un-necessary hardship which the law is supposed to have a way of alleviating? Maybe? Please?

I’ll send that to our UC contact from stakeholders Martin…

It’s also worth mentioning that although there is a brief mention of advance payments on the UC pages of gov.uk, there is still very little information available on that site and a search for advance payments does not even take you straight to that very small amount of information.

It’s just appalling customer service to put a message like that out anyway. I am pretty sure my local authority would not dream of putting out an automated message like that, and nor would most others.

I don’t think the DWP are remotely interested in providing adequate customer service.  In DWP-land, if you are needy enough to even consider claiming benefits you are automatically “undeserving” and should be treated like something unpleasant on the sole of the adviser’s shoe.

Benny - perhaps a bit of a generalisation?  Maybe a trifle over the top?  They not all that bad.  I heard today of a case where someone was helping a friend to claim UC.  Needless to say, the computer system crashed.  So he phoned DWP & spoke to someone who was very helpful and said she would take the claim over the phone and submit it.  Of course, when she’d just about finished her system crashed!

I feel the problem is often not the front line staff, but the difficulties they have working with inadequate systems and backup.

Response via operational stakeholders -

For the Universal Credit Full Service telephony number the message does not say this, it provides opportunity for the claimant to discuss anything further (advances etc.) with an agent.

For the live service we are aware of this issue but thank you very much for bringing this to our attention.  We are currently talking to a telephony management team to get this resolved as they agree this message is not right.  The team are getting together next week and we should then know a time line for resolving the messaging in line with the full service script.

I’ve asked them to update me following the meeting next week…

how many years has this benefit been in the design and development stages, I see page after page of predictable and preventable UC problems on this site . man-kind put a man on the moon nearly half a century ago !!!. Happy New Year