HindleA wrote:Morning.
@LadyCentauria
from DWP :
"The last new claims to legacy benefits will be accepted during 2017.
Following this the stock of remaining legacy claims will progressively decline, and the department will migrate the remaining claims to Universal Credit. Should there be no change in the labour market outlook or the pace at which claims are migrated, the current business case assumes for planning purposes the bulk of this exercise will be complete by 2019."
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/welf ... -by-spring" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
This latest piece of guff says that "Support worth up to 70% of childcare costs will be available regardless of hours worked" which sounds really good; later it says "Working families on UC can claim back 70% they've paid out for childcare", which doesn't.
So the childcare has to be paid for first - which is not going to be easy for people who have no money; on top of that, there is a cap on how much that 70% can be, at £532 for 1 child and £912 for two or more. Monthly.
The average cost of a nursery place is about £150 a week; if you have two children, that'll cost £1,300 a month. 70% of that is £910, so the cost to the parent is £390 - assuming that they get the money back when they claim for it.
If you get a job and have 2 under-school-age kids, you will have to find £1,300 up front and claim back the £910 later; whatever your wages or UC award is, you have to factor in the £390 you have to pay in childcare every month.
The splendid Brian Wernham has been Tweeting about what he calls the "media blitz" this week on UC - the next NAO report on it is due and it looks like the government wants to get its propaganda out first. DWP has published reams of new guidance for UC in the past few days - it looks like its getting its excuses in before the report is published.
In the link HindleA provided and in various soundbites from IDS, we are told that UC is such a roaring success that UC claimants are "working more over a 6 month period - 69% under UC compared with 65% under JSA"
This means that a handful of people who find work when on UC are doing a tiny bit more than their JSA equivalents. That's not very impressive at all when you consider the demographics.
There are, we are told, about 11,000 people claiming UC. These are all single people with no children, no disabilities, no complications who are claiming only the JSA-type component of UC. If they are entitled to Housing Benefit, this continues to be administered by their local authority at the moment. They are all "new" claims.
They are the single group of claimants most likely to find work quickly; 80% of all new JSA claimants find work within 6 months. So it should be expected that a similar level of people who would normally have an uncomplicated JSA claim will behave in the same way if the have a new uncomplicated UC claim.
The "working more" thing is very misleading. These figures suggest that, over a 6-month period, 4% more of UC claimants than JSA claimants are doing more work; but it doesn't say how many of those people there are.
It could be 100, it could be 1,000, it could be one. The work could be anything from one hour upwards, but not ull time or there would be no entitlement to UC as the claims are all JSA-replacement only.
All this means is that whatever the number of people is, 4% of the ones on UC are doing more work than their JSA counterparts; if you claim JSA you cannot work more than 16 hours, and in practice as 11.5 hours a week at NMW is more than JSA if you did 12 hours you'd have to come off it anyway - on UC you can work a bit more before DWP closes the claim.
For most JSA claimants, it's not worth bothering with a temporary job which is part-time on NMW, because the hassle of sorting out HB etc. and re-claiming after a few days is such a pain, and now they have to wait for 7 days before the new claim is even registered, so they lose at least a week of JSA (or more if their pre-claim jobsearch isn't up to scratch)
I suspect that, assuming this 69%/65% thing is true, the UC claimants may be doing odd bits of work in a way the JSA claimants can't.
Thanks to the draconian jobsearch conditions for UC, it is worth the claimants' while to do this - if they don't, they will be sanctioned and the penalty for "refusal of employment" is 26 weeks for the first offence.
Even if all the claimants on UC now had got some bit of work in 6 months, the number is still very small - 11,000. If there were also 11,000 JSA claimants who had also found a bit of work in the 6 months used as the comparison, all this tells us is that 440 UC claimants got a bit more work than their JSA counterparts, which could be anything from one hour to twelve hours on one occasion or more.
Not impressed.
