Have you got clients who haven’t been sent UC50 despite sending fitnotes in?

Hi

As some of you may know, NAWRA has been campaigning hard to get DWP to address the issue of UC50s not always being issued leading to months, or even years, without a WCA and therefore no LCWRA element in payment.

See https://www.nawra.org.uk/2022/09/failure-by-dwp-to-initiate-wca-and-issue-uc50-our-letter-to-the-minister/ for more info.

Following our letter to the Minister we had a meeting with officials a couple of weeks ago and one of the follow ups from that is that a DWP user researcher has contacted us and is keen to speak to a handful of advisers who have clients who have been affected by this issue. No claimant details are needed - it is to understand the issue.

Further down the line they may be interested in also speaking to claimants if they were willing and again without any being identified - a voucher would be issued as thanks.

Below is the ask from the researcher - if you think you could help, please let me know below and I will send on.

My name is Georgiana Murariu and I work as a User Researcher within the Universal Credit service, with a specific focus on claimants with health conditions.

My role involves looking at the parts of the programme that relate to health conditions and investigating how well these work for our users.

I am keen to find out more about your experience assisting citizens claiming UC. In particular, I would like to gather more evidence about cases where citizens experienced long-term health conditions and were submitting fitnotes but did not receive a UC50

This is so I can take the findings back to my team and build an evidence base of how we can improve the health journey for UC claimants.

Your feedback will enable us to add to what we already understand and means we can decide how it might fit into what we already know about the wider/longer UC health journey, so we can understand the best solution.

My initial approach would be to conduct multiple interviews with caseworkers/advisers so I can understand some of the detail behind the scenarios that you have come across in your work. I will not ask you to reveal any personally identifiable information about claimants – all details will be / should be anonymised, and nothing you say will impact anyone’s claim or their interactions with the DWP or Jobcentre Plus.

Would it be possible to set up a ‘feedback session’ with yourself sometime in March to understand more about this? This would be virtual, on MS Teams (if you are able to access this). In terms of time, anything between 30-45 minutes should hopefully give us enough time to explore this but I am flexible.

The feedback that I will take to my team will be anonymised, for example, if I used a quote from the feedback session, I might attribute it to “Caseworker 1”.

If you are happy for me to contact you for the purposes of research, please let Daphne know and I will be in touch to arrange something.

Any questions – please let me know.

Further to this we had a meeting with officials last week.

To cut a long story short, it has now come to light that when a claimant submits a fitnote, an automatic ‘to-do’ is created for them in their journal.

Until now this has not been populated, but DWP realise now that they could use this to put in standard info about the WCA, when to expect a UC50 and what to do if they don’t get it - so basically an automated process that we suggested in our first communications with them around 18 months ago!

They hope to get the wording sorted by September - so long as other things don’t get in the way - and they have said they will run their proposed wording by us in advance.

So fingers crossed an improvement is coming…