Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, whether her Department has made an assessment of the potential merits of ending the five week wait for universal credit by making the advance payment a grant when the claim is confirmed.

Nobody has to wait five weeks for a payment under Universal Credit. Advances are a mechanism for getting claimants faster access to their entitlement; allowing claimants to receive 13 payments over 12 months with up to 12 months to repay the advance.

New Claims Advances of up to 100% of potential entitlement are available if a claimant needs support during their first assessment period. Face-to-face checks for Universal Credit advances have been scrapped due to Covid-19, so people get the support they need despite COVID-19 restrictions.

The Government has already taken steps to help ease the burden of the repayment of advances.

We have reduced the maximum deduction from 40% to 30% of a claimant’s standard allowance. The Budget 2020 set out that the maximum level will be further reduced, so that standard deductions will not exceed 25% of a claimant’s Standard Allowance from October 2021.

The repayment time for advances has already been extended from 6 months to 12 months, and a further extension to 24 months from October 2021 was announced in the budget. Claimants can ask for repayments to be delayed for up to 3 months if they can’t afford them.

Any further changes to this policy would require significant system development at a time when all resources are rightly focused on processing new claims. We will continue to review our policies but have no further planned changes at this time