Amber Rudd “happy” with 5 week Universal Credit wait
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Work and Pensions Secretary, Amber Rudd has caused upset and shock by saying the 5 week wait for claimant’s first Universal Credit payment is acceptable. Unveiling a raft of “supposed” new announcements for Universal Credit, Rudd said of the 5 week period claimants have to wait; “at the moment I’m satisfied with what we’ve got”.
This will come as a surprise to many as the extended wait has long been cited as causing increased hardship on claimants.
Whenever this is raised with the Department for Work and Pensions of a welfare minister the response is always; “we have increased advances to 100% of the claimants award to help ease things for them whilst they wait.”
Advances are part of the problem
It is advances that, from my own experience, make things worse. When I first moved onto Universal Credit I took an advance as I had nothing to my name and the housing association wanted rent. Little did I know that this would be the start of 9 months of suffering and hardship.
I was having my advance reclaimed from my benefit payment at £125 per month. This left me with a grand total of £190 per month to pay my bills, feed myself, pay transport costs and buy food for my children whom I have at weekends.
After bills I have about £10.50 for food for a fortnight.
Studies by charities and think tanks have also said that advances are not the solution. They just push claimants further into debt. Furthermore, were the DWP regulated like a bank, they’d have been fined for irresponsible lending practices.
An advance is a loan and the Department should be checking claimants can afford repayments, which they don’t. Instead, they take 30% of their benefit whether it will cause difficulties or not.
Out of Touch Rudd
Since becoming the Work and Pensions Secretary, the mainstream media have been painting Amber Rudd like the saviour of welfare claimants. She’s not. Nearly everything she has done or announced is no more than a helpful soundbite for the government.
They blatantly helped peddle a lie that “managed migration” had been delayed by Rudd, when in-fact, it was her predecessor Esther McVey MP who made the announcement in October 2018.
For her to now to say that 5 weeks is an acceptable time for some of the most vulnerable people in the UK to wait to be able to buy food or pay their bills, shows just how out of touch she really is.
The name Universal Credit is tainted with so much suffering and pain that the only sensible thing left to do is scrap it. Anything short of that is no victory at all.
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I attended a new food bank collection point official opening today. I want to be closing them down, it wasn’t a happy moment. The charity who will benefit from the collections has never seen it so bad, and they are so worried as UC was rolled out (full service) a month before Christmas. This is the tip of the iceberg, we know it’s simply going to get worse and worse. We know somewhere locally there is someone starving to death who we don’t know about, and can’t find to help. There are children stunted and harmed. Parents starving and malnourished, arriving in a state of famished fainting at the food bank door. I want this lot gone, gone, and Labour in power before we lose anymore lives. If Rudd is happy, then that’s the final proof if needed she is a psychopath.
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When is uc going to be stopped as doesnt work and how many more must die bsfore its stopped????!!!!!!
If you are available to claim the money then this should be deducted from any payments the claimant would receive if the first payment after the time proposed by the wait not months down the line after they try and claim delays. If they don’t have the staff to authorise the claims employ more, but do not make the claimant wait weeks or months for a first payment. They say X weeks so let them stick to the contract or pay the claimant compensation for late payments, late payments work both ways DWP Late they pay you , you don’t pay them you pay them, see how much they spend on paying claimants for missing payment dates?
a few years ago dwp sacked a lot of job center staff which I think is why this system isn’t working.
you need people to enter data onto systems so claimants can be paid quickly and on time – without nothing is getting done as quick as it should
you need people to do the interviews – without claimants are waiting ages.
Without both the frontline and backroom staff universal credit will never work as it’s meant to and will only get worse as more people are put on this benefit.
In my opinion It’s not the benefit itself that’s the whole problem – it’s the way it’s being implemented without the resources.
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