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Forum Home  →  Discussion  →  Universal credit migration  →  Thread

Managed Migration - how will we ever get them to listen?

Andrew Dutton
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Welfare rights service - Derbyshire County Council

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https://www.rightsnet.org.uk/welfare-rights/news/item/testing-of-managed-migration-operational-readiness-will-not-begin

Interesting. As are the letters from Amber Rudd and Neil Couling.

Rudd’s is notable for its snarky tone:

She claims that the NAO found the idea of ‘pivoting cases back to legacy’ to be ‘neither feasible nor desirable’ and wants the Select Committee to help her make the costs and risks of a return to legacy benefits ‘more widely understood by those proffering comment on Universal Credit’.

I think that is not what the NAO said (assuming Ms Rudd is referring to the report that nearly scuppered her predecessor):

‘The Department does not have a realistic alternative but to continue. Its incremental approach has led the Department to make many changes to its jobcentres, its digital systems and the working practices of the 12,000 people working on Universal Credit. As it has rolled out Universal Credit to more claimants and areas, these changes have become increasingly embedded across the Department. It would be both complex and expensive to revert to legacy benefits at this stage’

https://www.nao.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Rolling-out-Universal-Credit.pdf

This can be read as something quite different to ‘neither feasible nor desirable’, e.g. ‘DWP has made such a mess and wasted so much cash to date that it would be very costly to unpick the changes.’ No comment on the desirability of such an action is offered.

Ms Rudd also throws in the doomy statement ‘Universal Credit is now the system of social security in this country’. .

Mr Couling’s letter verges on paranoia:

‘I have observed that some stakeholders are nervous fearing perhaps they may invite criticism of themselves for participating’. ‘A list of who is working with us’ is provided to the Committee ‘in the strictest confidence’.

He also attacks, yet again, ‘scare-mongering…hitting the confidence of claimants.’
In a brilliant breakthrough, he suggests referring to ‘Move to UC’ rather than ‘managed migration’.

So: we should shut up, stop criticising and, apparently, accept secrecy regarding who is helping to shape managed migration.

How will we ever be able to get these people to listen?

ClairemHodgson
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Solicitor, SC Law, Harrow

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Andrew Dutton - 02 May 2019 03:27 PM

How will we ever be able to get these people to listen?

ensure someone else wins the next election, and that they all have to claim UC when having no cushion to assist the process?  the second part of that no so easy, of course, since if they all lose all their money there’d have to have been another financial crash per the depression/2008