Universal credit and eligibility to EEA national

Hi
Can someone please advice if EEA national who claimed JSA for 10 years and now has to make a claim for UC as their JSA was stopped due to sanction would be entitled to UC?
The person has a residence card.

Thank

It’s impossible to say - whether your client has a right to reside is not the same question as whether they have successfully claimed benefits in the past.

It is not normally a good idea for legacy benefit claimants who are EEA nationals to voluntarily put themselves on UC as there are almost invariably issues with the habitual residence test which can take weeks or months to iron out even if they are ultimately successful.

However, GE v SSWP (ESA) [2017] UKUT 145 (AAC); [2017] AACR 34 tells us that time spent as a “jobseeker” is sufficient in national law to build towards a permanent right of residence. So if it were accepted that your client had been genuinely looking for work for a period of at least five years, that would give him permanent residence which would be sufficient to succeed on a claim for UC. There would be a risk that the DWP would say that he can’t have been “genuinely looking for work” or that he did not have a reasonable chance of finding it given a decade of apparently unsuccessful jobseeking.

Hi
Thanks for the advice. I think I should have said this person has a residence card issued by home office after working for 5 years. The person the claimed jobseekers allowance for 8 years and now after sanction the claim was stopped. The person made a claim for UC and at the HRT appointment today was only asked to show the residence card and was told all was ok. Would this mean there shouldn’t be any issues with HRT?

5+ yrs as a worker would also make your client a permanent resident which would suffice for benefits purposes.