Universal Credit and retirement

It would surely not be very difficult to, at the absolute minimum, add in some sort of pop-up prompt to the case manager’s screen (of the sort which already exists) which just goes:

“IF “claimant’s DOB” + 65 years >= ‘today’s date’
THEN print:

“You are trying to award Universal Credit to someone over the age of 65. Please check if they have reached pension age as Universal Credit is no longer payable if so”

Believe it or not. Possibly not.

The complexity of the contractual element of this likely means that some of it is provided to DWP on the understanding that their in house team will never touch it. No-one is going to go back to the contractor for small changes until such time as the small changes add up to something of substance or if the contract explicitly says “you can have this module as is but you can’t tamper with it and we’re not going to touch it either”.

But changes are made to the IT system every 2 weeks so they really ought to be able to do it!

Daphne - 31 October 2019 02:29 PM

But changes are made to the IT system every 2 weeks so they really ought to be able to do it!

Depends on which bits of the IT system and who owns them as I understand it.

Andrew Dutton - 30 October 2019 10:37 AM

http://data.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/committeeevidence.svc/evidencedocument/work-and-pensions-committee/the-work-of-the-secretary-of-state-for-work-and-pensions/oral/106392.html

Q362 onwards. He is not exactly answering the issues raised in this thread and he is not exactly using any recognisable language, but is there something buried in here….?

Thanks very much Andrew, sorry been bit tardy catching up with things.