Universal Credit (Liverpool)

Mike Wood Excerpts

Tuesday 11th September 2018 Westminster Hall

[Dan Carden]

It is absolutely unacceptable, and Ministers know that the system has major structural problems. Payment of universal credit is 35 days in arrears, which results in the common requirement for an advance payment. One local member of Department for Work and Pensions staff called the five-week wait a “scandal in itself”, and in practice it can take up to 12 weeks before claimants are paid the correct amount. That staff member also told me that the so-called advance payments put claimants even further in debt, because future payments are reduced by up to 40% to claw the money back. That corresponds with data released by Citizens Advice, which shows that more than half its clients who receive universal credit were forced to borrow money while waiting for their first payment. Other problems include payment as a single lump sum, including housing costs, which causes households to choose between rent or food, especially at the outset of the claim.

There is also the online system. We know that 17% of people who earn less than £20,000 never use the internet—I have met people in that situation. One in five disabled people, and two in five of those with learning disabilities, do not have access to the internet, and the DWP’s own analysis shows that just under half of all claimants are unable to register their claim online. How have the Government prepared for the online roll-out in Liverpool? By closing four jobcentres—including two in my constituency—and eight across Merseyside, in the very areas where claimant rates are highest. It beggars belief to take away the very facilities that were established to support those seeking work.

Despite cuts, our local authority has set aside £50 million to protect the most vulnerable people. We have, I believe, one of the best benefit support services in the country, so that when people are in crisis, they can at least access emergency financial support such as discretionary housing payments, the mayoral hardship fund and crisis payments. Liverpool’s benefit maximisation scheme costs £3 million a year, and its specialist advisers last year helped to secure an extra £10.5 million for Liverpool’s families. No ring-fenced money has been provided by the Government for that—the money comes from general funds and reserves. In the last two years, £1 million has been spent topping up discretionary housing payments, and stopping countless people losing their homes before the roll-out of universal credit has even taken place.

Austerity has decimated our local council services, yet for years the local authority has acted as a sticking plaster for the worst effects of austerity. This autumn’s roll-out of universal credit is expected to rip that away, and I am told that it will simply no longer be able to cope. One problem is that the DWP does not currently share data with local authorities, which means that it is impossible to identify and support people with differing needs for support. It shifts the burden of responsibility on to vulnerable people to seek out support services themselves, and the tragic reality is that we simply will not find those people until it is too late—until they have lost their home, until they are on the streets, until we find them in A&E, or until they simply become one more suicide statistic.

We know that nearly three quarters of housing association tenants on universal credit are in debt, compared with less than a third of all other tenants. Riverside Housing Association told me:

“The time of planned rollout is particularly worrying as it comes ahead of Christmas, a time when historically our tenants often struggle financially due to the additional heating costs and the festive season—with debt and arrears increasing.”

The Trussell Trust reports that in the past year food bank referrals rose by 52% in areas where the full service of universal credit was introduced in the previous 12 months, compared with a 13% rise across the UK as a whole. North Liverpool Foodbank says that changes to benefits are the most common crisis suffered by families, and that is before the full service has been rolled out.

In the local private rented sector the situation is even more critical. I spoke to a letting agent based in my constituency who told me that 100% of the agency’s tenants who are on universal credit are now in rent arrears—every one of them. Letting agents complain of ongoing issues in securing direct payment of housing costs under universal credit, even when the tenant has given explicit consent. I was told that one tenant on live service universal credit was £700 in arrears and was moved on to direct payment; then, as soon as full service was rolled out in Bootle, a neighbouring constituency, the direct payments stopped again. The tenant is now £2,500 in arrears. The letting agency told me, as others have, that it is at the point of refusing universal credit claimants altogether.

I do not need a crystal ball to tell the Minister that if the roll-out continues and the Government press ahead, there will be even more people living on the streets. More than 90% of local authorities surveyed by Crisis said they expected the roll-out of universal credit to increase homelessness. Rough sleeping in England has already more than doubled under the present Government. Let us remember that the first claimants to move on to universal credit were single unemployed jobseekers—the so-called easy cases. This autumn people with much more complex circumstances will transfer on to the system. It is a sobering thought that the worst is yet to come. It is a scandal for Ministers to proceed when basic failures in the system have not been fixed.

[Mike Wood (Dudley South) (Con)]

I understand the hon. Gentleman’s quite legitimate concerns, but perhaps I can offer a little reassurance following the roll-out that has already happened in Dudley. Many claimants and the jobcentre—particularly in Stourbridge—are seeing that universal credit gives extra flexibility to help cases that simply would not have received the help and appropriate support they needed under the old system. More people—precisely the kind of difficult cases that he refers to—are getting into work and staying in work.

[Dan Carden]

I can tell the hon. Gentleman categorically that that is not the experience of people moving on to universal credit. The evidence I am giving in my speech does not back it up.

Analysis by Citizens Advice shows that a self-employed worker earning £9,750 a year would be £630 worse off under universal credit than an employee with an identical annual income but paid a regular monthly salary. It is astounding that the Government have overseen an increasingly insecure jobs market, based on bogus self-employment and agency and zero-hours jobs, while putting in place a welfare system that leaves the workers who do those very jobs hundreds of pounds worse off each year.

There are also changes to the work allowance. Mary is a hard-working single parent of three children in Liverpool and under the old system her income was topped up with £48 child benefit each week and a universal credit payment of £885 a month. After the changes, Mary’s salary and child benefit remained the same but her universal credit was cut by £219 a month. It is just another family pushed into hardship.

Yesterday I visited a constituent called Ann, who went on to universal credit when she lost her job as a cleaning supervisor in New Brighton in July 2015. She phoned the Department for Work and Pensions the next day to register a claim and was asked to attend a local jobcentre in Everton. She attended and was advised that she would need to go online to register, but she explained she had never had access to a computer or training in the use of one. She was asked whether she had a relative she could get assistance from. She was never once offered assistance in completing the application, even after she admitted lacking the skills to do so.

Ann attended a universal credit appointment on 18 August and received her first payment on 21 September. She went 10 weeks without receiving any payments and when she was in distress was told to attend the local food bank. She sought the support of local councillors in their surgery, because of the humiliation she felt at her situation and her lack of food. After her claim was live, she had three consecutive months of sanctions because of bewilderment at the system, and lack of understanding of the digital diary. She was then informed that she had to travel to look for jobs, but without any offer of travel expenses up front—all expenses had to be claimed back through receipts.

Ann summed up the experience as humiliating, degrading and utterly confusing—and she was one of the easy claimants selected for live roll-out. She was one of thousands in the city who will have followed a similar path from factory work decades ago to low-skilled work more recently, and who are now on the jobs market with no computer skills to enable them to navigate the system. I am sick of living in a society where we punish people because a broken economy does not provide them with decent jobs. What looks good to Ministers on paper is in reality asking a 60-year-old woman who has worked all her life to spend hours each day walking around a city handing in CVs in shops, begging for jobs. I do not think it is humane or worthwhile for society to be in that position.

I am here today to ask the Minister to apply the brakes—to stop the roll-out of universal credit in Liverpool and fix the flaws in its design and delivery. Outside Whitehall there is total acceptance that the current system will cause untold misery and push communities to breaking point across Liverpool. The Government have thrown away cross-party support for a new benefits model that would simplify the welfare state, and instead have caused chaos. Universal credit could be accepted, but only if it worked as originally intended. Ministers must remove the mandatory waiting period of 35 days; provide additional ring-fenced funding for local authorities based on local need; reverse the cuts to the work allowance and family premium; make sure that families making a claim for universal credit are at least as well off as they were under the previous system; remove the freeze on the benefit allowance and make sure welfare support reflects the needs of families; withdraw the disastrous two-child policy; and carry out a full cumulative impact assessment on the impact of welfare reforms at a local level. Finally, they must ensure that universal credit really does “make work pay”, while also carrying out the statutory duty of care to citizens.

The director general for the universal credit programme is Neil Couling. According to the ministerial code, he has responsibility for its implementation and has the power to pause it. I call on him urgently to use that power. He and Ministers have been warned about the impending crisis if they push ahead. I ask the Minister to step back and evaluate: what is the policy trying to achieve? I understand the predicament that the Department is in. It would cause a headache in Whitehall to pause the roll-out. Changes are deeply embedded, and it would be complex and expensive to stop, but that cannot mean, “Shut your eyes and hope for the best.”

Seven years ago there was cross-party agreement on the principle of simplifying the benefits system and helping people into work. However, the policy has unravelled because it was built on deeply flawed assumptions about what causes unemployment, designed in Whitehall by people who have never experienced poverty. It has become part of an agenda to undermine welfare provision and force the vulnerable and disabled to pay for an economic crisis caused by an elite. It is a joke that the Government talk about making work pay at a time when real wages are lower than they were 10 years ago. The Government have already been forced into a series of changes on universal credit. They backtracked on charging for the claimant helpline, they rolled back the six-week minimum wait—albeit only to five weeks—and they backtracked on 18 to 21-year-olds being excluded from the housing allowance. The Government know that the system is not working.

We urgently need to change the culture of the social security system from one that demonises people who are not in work to one that supports people and communities, that lifts people up rather than kicking them while they are down, and that seeks to improve the pay and conditions of those in work rather than punishing those who are not. Decent wages, lifelong learning and a patient strategy of long-term investment are how we will achieve a prosperous society. I shall continue to make those arguments in this House, but right now I have only one ask for the Minister: pause the roll-out of universal credit in Liverpool; fix it and save my constituents from the inevitable suffering it will unleash.

--- Later in debate ---

[Guy Opperman]

I cannot comment on the individual case, but it is unquestionably the case that the old system had inherent flaws and, as the hon. Member for Liverpool, Walton very fairly said in his speech, it was right for it to be reformed at that particular time. We may have a debate and a discussion about the quality of the system thereafter, but the reform of the old system was unquestionably the right thing.

Under UC, claimants are better off when they move into work and better off when they progress in work; the payment is gradually reduced as earnings increase, so claimants will not lose all their benefits at once if they are on a low income. There is no 16-hour ceiling, no 16-hour floor and no risk to people’s benefit as they move into work. It also means that the more people work, the more money they get in their pocket. We believe that universal credit lies at the heart of our reforms to transform the welfare system, because it supports those who can work and cares for those who cannot.

The UC full service is available in approximately 63% of jobcentres in Liverpool, with those remaining to be rolled out by December, as the hon. Gentleman outlined. I would urge all hon. Members to visit their local jobcentres and to speak to the staff in charge of the system, the work coaches and the claimants who are attending. I myself have visited a number of jobcentres and sat in on randomly selected interviews with dedicated work coaches. I held a jobs fair last Friday in Hexham with my Jobcentre Plus, and I am going to another jobcentre this week.

[Mike Wood]

I thank the Minister for visiting my constituency and meeting with local advocacy organisations, representative groups and local charities, who deal with people claiming universal credit on a daily basis. What lessons and messages did he receive from those organisations in Dudley, where the roll-out was completed over a year ago, about how the system has changed and improved with the tweaks that have been made?

[Guy Opperman]

The reality of the situation is that, as the roll-out takes place across the country, there are good examples, as was seen when I visited Brierley Hill in my hon. Friend’s constituency, of excellent integration—