Universal credit managed migration - the age of discovery

Introduction

Managed migration to universal credit (UC) is the process whereby people on the old legacy benefits will be moved onto UC. The UC managed migration process will require all remaining legacy claimants to submit new claims for UC or, ultimately, have their existing benefits stopped. The DWP’s most recent estimates are that 2.6 million people remained on legacy benefits as of April 2022 and that 1.7 million people will need to be managed migrated to UC. Forty-five per cent of these will be long term employment and support allowance claimants and 40 per cent will be tax credits claimants. Nine hundred thousand existing claimants are estimated to be worse off and 600,000 will qualify for transitional protection.1

The DWP has research showing that the planned managed migration process risks causing and exacerbating vulnerability.2 Both the Social Security Advisory Committee (SSAC)3 and the Work and Pensions Select Committee4 have raised concerns about managed migration, and its impact on vulnerable claimants, in the past.

The Harrogate pilot

The DWP committed to carrying out a pilot of the managed migration process to learn how best to move people to UC without resorting to stopping legacy benefits.5 Parliament agreed a cap of 10,000 managed migration cases after which the DWP would need to return to parliament for permission to roll out managed migration nationwide.6 The DWP had planned to engage at least 5,000 people in the pilot, through a mix of engagement methods, before returning to parliament.7

Eighty people on legacy benefits were invited to claim UC as part of the Harrogate pilot. Fifty-three people appear to have formally been issued with a migration notice and given a deadline for claiming UC. Thirty-eight of those people had made a claim for UC by the time that the pilot was suspended in March 2020, due to the pandemic. Six people in the Harrogate pilot missed their initial deadline for claiming UC and the DWP does not know how many of these people had disabilities or vulnerabilities.8

The pilot was paused, and subsequently abandoned, due to the pandemic.

The discovery phase

The DWP now intends to learn about managed migration through a ‘discovery phase’. The DWP has published guidance and set up a helpline for claimants issued with a migration notice.9

The discovery phase began in May 2022 with 500 claimants in Bolton and Medway being issued with migration notices and 12 UC case managers supporting them through the process (a lower claimant to case manager ratio than usual).10 Two hundred fifty migration notices were due to be issued in the Truro and Falmouth area in late July. This phase is scheduled to last until the end of 2022.

The DWP has said that the migration notice being used in the discovery phase does not signpost to independent advice and does not include information about the erosion of transitional protection.

Couples and claimants with particularly complex circumstances – such as the terminally ill, people with visual impairments, and people requiring home visits – have so far been excluded from the discovery phase. More claimants will be notified over summer 2022, including couples, new locations will be included, and new migration notices will be tested.

The DWP will make a minimum one-month extension to the initial three-month deadline for the first groups of claimants in this initial phase of discovery.11 The DWP will start to learn whether claimants are missing their deadlines between August and October 2022.

The DWP has been unwilling to discuss some aspects of its policy publicly. It has requested redaction of SSAC minutes12 and was unwilling to publicly discuss policies on vulnerable claimants with the Work and Pensions Select Committee.13

Evaluation transparency

There are important differences in the promised transparency between the DWP’s approach to the pilot and its approach to the discovery phase. The DWP planned to publish an evaluation strategy and evaluation for the pilot, but it does not plan to do so for the discovery phase.14 The evaluation strategy would have set out key questions the DWP would use to evaluate the pilot, but it was never published so it is not possible to properly assess the results of either the pilot phase or the discovery phase against these criteria. The documents that the DWP has published about the Harrogate pilot do not fulfil the DWP’s promise to publish an evaluation strategy and an evaluation. Without these documents, neither parliament nor anybody else can hold the DWP to account before managed migration is rolled out.

The DWP appears to regard the requirement to report to parliament after reaching the 10,000 cap as an unwelcome ‘external barrier’.15

The SSAC proposed a system of independent oversight but the DWP rejected this. The SSAC initially encouraged the DWP to retain the 10,000 cap, but the DWP rejected this (citing the supposed complexity of tabling amending regulations – although the regulations automatically become law unless parliament rejects them).16 After taking the regulations on reference, the SSAC continued to register its concerns but did not recommend the retention of the cap. Instead the SSAC made recommendations regarding the oversight of managed migration, noting that the current system amounts to the UC programme setting and marking its own homework. The DWP formally noted the recommendations but did not explicitly reject or accept any of them.17

What next?

The DWP has now laid regulations, which came into force on 25 July, which, among other things, lift the 10,000 cap on managed migrated.18

The regulations, which were laid under negative procedure, will continue to have effect unless the opposition’s motion to reject them is agreed within 40 sitting days.19 The House of Lords Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee has drawn the regulations to the special attention of the House.20

After a slow start, there will be a dramatic increase in the rate of claimants going through managed migration, expected in the second half of 2023. The SSAC states that there is no question that this presents the most significant risk in the programme so far. The DWP says that moving to scale will depend on getting the process right in earlier phases. 

Future editions of the Bulletin will cover the process by which people will be managed migrated to UC.