SDP in UC?

I was recently in some despair at being told by an agent on the UC helpline that my client with SDP could claim UC as “There’s SDP in UC now” and then I saw this (retrieved today, from Friday’s newletter):

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/10-million-fund-to-help-vulnerable-people-claim-universal-credit?utm_source=6b472b35-82a6-408d-ad9b-6cd74e4f5bb8&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=govuk-notifications&utm_content=immediate

I quote:

“Other help for vulnerable people

DWP is providing severe disability payments (SDP) to protect the most vulnerable. Severely disabled claimants can receive SDP to support their living costs as they move onto Universal Credit. This is worth a maximum of £405 a month to claimants – worth £600 million over the next 6 years for 45,000 claimants.”

Can anyone clarify if this is referring to the compensation payments (i.e. a re-announcement of something that was already happening), or to the transitional payments planned for managed migration (a re-announcement of something that was already planned)? It’s interesting that this message seems to have penetrated the consciousness of DWP staff, albeit in garbled form while I find fairly general ignorance about the existence of the SDP gateway.

I think it’s referring to the transitional payments but it’s a shockingly misleading press release - there is no SDP in UC and generally disabled people are much worse off on it but you wouldn’t know that reading the press release - nothing to do with the election I’m sure…

How about passing this on to Aditya Chakrabortty at The Guardian? He’s the journalist who broke the story about the DWP’s misleading UC campaign, which has just been condemned by the Advertising Standards Authority.

I might just do that…

Only just catching up with this thread (I forgot to tick the ‘notify me via email’ box) but did you pass this on to the Guardian? From my experience, many clients with SDP are still being wrongly advised to claim UC, so anything that raises awareness of the gateway both in the general population and among DWP staff would be helpful.

i did tweet a link to the thread to Aditya Chakrabortty

Excellent, thanks Daphne. Hopefully he’ll pick it up.