Coronavirus crisis won’t persuade Tories to axe the five-week wait for Universal Credit
97,386th in the queue: one claimant’s Universal Credit agony caught in a screenshot.
The Conservatives have insisted on forcing financial instability on hundreds of thousands of people – by refusing to ditch the five-week wait for Universal Credit.
The Tory government has claimed it is helping people who have lost income because of the coronavirus crisis by saying they can claim UC while the UK is under lockdown.
But their refusal to waive the five-week rule means the half a million or more people who have claimed in the last 10 days will be severely out-of-pocket.
Indeed, according to the PoliticsHome article (see link below), 70,000 people have already applied for an advance on their payments.
This is a loan. Good luck to all of those people when they try to pay it off!
This Writer can’t understand Therese Coffey’s comments.
She said: “The design is meant to be based on your general income. We need a month to assess what your monthly income is likely to be.”
No they don’t! They know exactly how much claimants have earned in the past and exactly how much they are likely to earn while they are claiming – it’s all included in the claim information.
I don’t even accept the excuse offered by Peter Schofield, Permanent Secretary for the Department for Work and Pensions.
He said it was impossible to change the conditions under which UC is paid because the system is working at full capacity and changing it would require “reprogramming, resetting or manual processes which we simply, at those levels of volumes, wouldn’t be able to manage”.
It’s a computerised system. Any such change should only require the equivalent of flicking a switch – otherwise what was the point of making it a computer program in the first place?
The intention was to make it easily-adaptable – or at least that’s what we were told.
So… what are we to conclude?
That the Conservatives are perfectly capable of changing Universal Credit to make it payable at once – but they refuse? Now why on Earth would they want to do that if we’re really “all in it together”?
Source: Government insists it won’t ditch five-week wait for Universal Credit despite coronavirus outbreak
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Fascist tories doing what they always do – lie and lie and lie and lie! And their mantra is ‘you are all in together whilst we wealthy boys are laughing!’
No way are the fascist tories going to pay public money to those women and men who are in dire straits! ‘You can all starve together’ is fascist tories’ mantra and I so hope all the women and men who voted fascist tories into power remember this is what they have done to you all! No money for you disposable non-humans!
They don’t want to change it because this would undermine the basic concept of Andrew Sabisky’s theory that we should kill off the poor and vulnerable.