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Removal of documents from a journal
From Hansard:
Q: Grahame Morris - To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, if she will (a) prohibit the removal by departmental officials of documents from a person’s universal credit journal and (b) ensure that in cases of official error the journal record is amended through the addition of a revising letter.
A: Alok Sharma - This function was introduced to allow for simple errors (such as spelling mistakes or messages entered before fully completed) to be rectified.
Jobcentre staff can only remove entries they have made and are not able to remove any other entries, such as those entered by another member of staff or claimant. It is important to note that this facility only removes the entry from the journal, with a permanent record being retained and stored on the system which can be retrieved if requested.
In situations where a Decision Maker’s decision has been revised, an official letter is uploaded to the claimant’s journal detailing the new decision and when it will take effect.
I’m not sure this entirely clarifies the situation where the award calculation screen is simply replaced with an amended one as if the award was never wrongly calculated to start with. ...
Should there not be some sort of detailed inquiry into the operation of the UC online system, what functions it has (or will have once fully developed) and what records are available to the claimant over time as decisions and circumstances change? All the information and queries and challenges seem to be taking diverse routes such as parliamentary questions, complaints, judicial reviews, emails to partnership managers, tweeting Neil Couling .... and it is extremely hard to follow and in short it is a ghastly mess.
in short it is a ghastly mess.
Sorry I didn’t meant to finish by turning into George Banks from Mary Poppins ...