Universal Credit rollout in October announced

Universal Credit will expand to 6 new Jobcentres starting from October 2013. The following Jobcentres will be included:

  Hammersmith
  Rugby
  Inverness
  Harrogate
  Bath
  Shotton

The Claimant Commitment will also roll out to all Jobcentres from October with all Jobcentres moving to the new universal commitment regime.

More @

http://www.rightsnet.org.uk/news/story/dwp-announce-next-stage-of-universal-credit-roll-out/

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/universal-credit-roll-out-from-october-2013

Does that mean the contact centres and processing centres listed in cpag has been abandoned?
I do so wish they could get themselves sorted.

I see its for new claims only but will it be for new claims from single, childless non householders as orginially planned?

And what about the plans to transfer (from Oct 13) all those on legacy benefits to UC if they had one of a number of changes in circs. - called natural migration?

And, does anyone know about the plans for the change from 2014?

Thanks

(is there someone nationally in dwp we could ask)

clive - 12 July 2013 08:57 AM

I see its for new claims only but will it be for new claims from single, childless non householders as orginially planned?

And what about the plans to transfer (from Oct 13) all those on legacy benefits to UC if they had one of a number of changes in circs. - called natural migration?

Who knows?  I suspect natural migration is still a long way off for most.

From evidence to the Select Committee

( http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201314/cmselect/cmworpen/uc569/uc56901.htm )

“Chair: ...So my question is: when you go to national roll-out, will it just be for that simple, straightforward, very narrow cohort that are presently able to claim in Ashton-under-Lyne?

Lord Freud: We will start off with our national footprint using the same criteria; we may adjust them somewhat. The objective is, as some of those people become more complicated-and they do include housing, and they will get partners-

Chair: That will be incredibly slow…”

If they keep using the “same criteria” that rules out any migration from legacy benefit (apart from claimants on legacy benfits who partner UC claimants).

In what language was Lord Fraud speaking? I fail to comprehend.

From evidence to the Select Committee - an extremely good read

( http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201314/cmselect/cmworpen/uc569/uc56901.htm )

UC an “agile process” (Q42 IDS reply)  -  methinks the agile process refers to the large amount ducking and diving going on.

Q50 Capacity and uptake - interchangeable?

Q66 Howard Shiplee - when is a glitch a glitch

Iain Duncan Smith also told the Committee, that, in addition to using the same criteria for selecting claimants as in the pathfinder -

‘The second aspect of what we are doing postOctober is we are then selecting some more difficult groups to run through the process to ensure that we understand how that works against our expectations, because we have done a lot of profiling and testing in this process.

All those three then mesh together next year to give us an expanded roll-out across all groups and-as our hope and expectation is on this, and I believe it will be the case-across both tax credits and Jobseeker’s Allowance. So we will meet our original goal but do it in a different way, but getting, I believe, pretty much to the same point as a result. The key point is we want to do just that point. In fact, Lord Freud was on at me about making sure we had some special facilities to test a number of those more complicated cases that may not be captured in the process of what we call the “once in, stay in” process.’ (Q25)

In addition, Lord Freud clarified that -

‘Just on this, as you will remember, even when we were looking at this two years ago we were planning to put the most vulnerable towards the end of the queue, for obvious reasons. So we have time to test really small numbers-and I am talking about tens to start with-to get those lessons and then start to get maybe a few hundreds to test the vulnerabilities.’ (Q29)