DWP issues “simple rules” for Universal Credit launch

“I really wouldn’t bother applying, if I were you” says DWP spokesperson, adding “as so few of you are likely to qualify”
 

The new information on the stringent qualifying criteria for Universal Credit (UC) came as the DWP confirmed that it was about to run the first stringent pilot test of the new systems that have been introduced in the DWP and HMRC to manage “many benefits under one label” UC, which will replace a number of currently separate benefits. 

Setting out the new criteria in detail the spokesperson explained that "UC will only go to single people; with no disabilities and no children, who are fit and able to work" quickly continuing “Who are not entitled to Housing Benefit or mortgage interest support, have been unemployed for no more than six months, do not have parents or siblings or partners with whom they are living in sin for whom they exercise any form of caring responsibility, and who were born in the Tameside area, preferably on a Tuesday in a year the digits of which are exactly divisible by 4 and who like listening to King Crimson and home baking and flower arranging"

This radical redefining of who can qualify for UC is fully expected to deliver the immense savings in welfare expenditure Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith has constantly been assuring Chancellor George Osborne UC would deliver, ever since the Chancellor agreed to provide the DWP with the countless hundreds of £millions extra funding required to deliver the IT hardware and software which UC required.

The DWP spokesperson also stressed that the pilot exercise would start shortly, as soon as “the pilot claimant” had been identified, adding that after several weeks work by a crack DWP investigative team bolstered by support from Tameside CID the department felt it was “close to identifying our man”.

The “pilot test” is likely to involve a “parallel running” exercise involving processing the pilot claim on both the new IT systems and manually, to see which works and which is quickest.  The DWP spokesperson said that should it prove in both cases to be the manual system that should not be regarded as “bad news” because it meant the full national roll out of UC could proceed whilst the Department concentrated on getting that new IT system up and running, without its unavailability hindering the garnering of the massive savings that UC will deliver, whilst adding that the DWP might have to run a swift recruitment exercise to ensure sufficient “paper and pen familiar” staff were on-hand to “process the claims from people who had given up trying to actually lodge an on-line claim, and simply printed the screen details out and walked them into their nearest JCP+”

(with thanks to MW for the steer)