Migration to Full Digital UC

We are due to go to Full Digital in October this year. However, we would like to hear people’s experiences around changes in circs triggering migration from legacy bens to UC.

It has been raised that when our rents are uprated in April next year, there is a potential for a “mass-migration” to be triggered. Has this happened elsewhere, and, if so, how was it handled? If not, what actually happened?

No, that won’t happen.  People migrate to UC in full service in exactly the same way as they do in live service: when their circumstances compel them to make a new claim.

Only difference in full service is that, in most situations, you cannot make a new claim for anything else apart from UC, so there is not much of a choice.  But there is no change of circumstance (and certainly not a rent increase) which triggers migration to UC per se .  What happens is this:

- You have a change of circumstance where under the old legacy benefit rules you would find it necessary to make a new claim for a legacy means-tested benefit
- In UC full service you generally cannot do that
- If you do not think you can manage to survive on whatever income you have without UC, you are going to have to claim UC

Common examples:

- Lose job, no entitlement to contribution based benefits
- Have first child, cannot afford to just not claim anything, but in most cases cannot make new claim for CTC
- Have change of circs while out of work that takes you out of eligibility for existing legacy benefit: get sick, get well, youngest child reaches 5th birthday.  No longer possible to make a new claim for JSA(ib) / ESA(ir).

Existing tenants getting HB whose rent changes next April will not migrate to UC if that is the only change.

One common mistake Councils make is proactively ending existing HB awards when the claimant has a change of circumstance that the Council anticipates would likely prompt migration to UC.  The Council then tells the claimant to make a UC claim.  That is not always the correct advice and certainly no existing HB claim has to end until the claimant actually does make a UC claim, or shack up with an existing UC claimant.  There are cases where the claimant won’t have to claim UC, eg single person on in-work partial HB becomes unemployed but qualifies for JSA(c).  No need to claim UC and HB can be reassessed to maximum based on new out-of-work income.