Impact of UC on advice work - any evidence / reports?

Citizens Advice publishe a report at the end of 2013. There have been several reports and press articles on the impact on housing providers.

Has anyone else produced evidence / report of the day to day impact of UC on advice work / services?

I am thinking of issues like:

Support for claimants to make a claim
short term benefit advances / food bank referals etc while waiting for first payment.
dealing with other delays in payment etc
change of circumstances
difficulty contacting DWP
demands placed on advice agencies - time & resources
engagemnt with local DWP/LA partnerships
etc. etc.

As UC is coming to our area shortly we would like to get an impression of how roll out of UC has affected advice agencies - has it affected your work, workload or how you provide services? Or has the impact so far been negligible / little different to the day to day issues we are all familiar with?

Hi Peter,

The impression I am getting from advisers already working in UC areas is that the impact has been negligible, because of the numbers of claimants involved, and the inevitable simplicity of their claims (as governed by the permitted pathfinder claim filter).

Of more concern seems to be how the advice sector should respond to the potential increase in demand as and when PIP migration really takes off, and also what to do when and if the PIP and ESA backlogs are finally addressed, triggering predictable increases in challenge assistance requests. I think advice agencies might be wise to start to consider formal risk assessments to guide them who they should actively help and who they cannot - that would at least introduce some kind of consistency, and allow clients to understand why they may not be going to be actively supported. It might help if there are complaints in relation to non-assistance. I had a go trying to draft a bare bones policy along these lines in relation to ESA.

I think advisers know that advice rationing/advice demand management may be increasingly inevitable (we are probably doing it already via waiting room sizes, waiting times and phone dominated services), but getting ones trustees to back a formal policy might be much trickier. Of course, it is inevitable that advice agencies have to survive to do good things, and that means dancing to funder demands in terms of advice unit numbers. However, within that imperative, I do think such risk assessments might be useful for all concerned. Sorry to ramble on away from the original theme of this thread.

What do you think?

Steve

Hi Peter

At the NAWRA meeting on Friday there was a workshop run by Peter Fitzhenry of Golden Gates Housing Trust in Warrington who have had UC for 18 months and he had a lot of interesting info - you could contact him direct or his presentation will be on the NAWRA website imminently…

I was at same workshop and in relation to your specific points Peter, I would summarise as follows:

Support for claimants to make a claim - very little evidence that was happening at all, maybe 2 or 3 claimants out of 138 overall
short term benefit advances / food bank referals etc while waiting for first payment - ditto
dealing with other delays in payment etc - contact problems, payment problems, delays inbuilt to system to some degree
change of circumstances - problematic and unpredictable outcomes
difficulty contacting DWP - definitely
demands placed on advice agencies - time & resources - the HA had concentrated on putting resources into employment support, as well as debt/money advice and UC administration for staff. despite this, arrears increased by 31% and income collection reduced from 98.4% to 89%.
engagemnt with local DWP/LA partnerships - key and crucial if you’re going to have any chance of dealing with

When asked at the end for what he could say that might be good about UC, his response was non-dep deductions being lower and that was all he could think of. One other point made was that they felt generic marketing/publicity materials had little impact on explaining changes to people affected and you really need to be looking at dealing with individual households affected, which is obviously a challenge for hard-pushed advice services.