Eleven-week hold-up for some Universal Credit claimants

SOME CLAIMANTS were waiting up to 11 weeks for Universal Credit even before numbers spiralled because of the coronavirus crisis, according to an official report.

The National Audit Office said the Department for Work and Pensions had significantly improved the proportion of claims paid on time, from 55 per cent in January 2017 to 90 per cent in February 2020.

But as the number of people claiming Universal Credit has grown, the number of people paid late has also increased, from 113,000 in 2017 to 312,000 in 2019.

New claimants who were paid late last year faced average delays of three weeks, in addition to the usual five-week wait for payment. About six per cent of households – 105,000 new claims – waited around 11 weeks or more for full payment, said the report from the audit office.

Stephen Timms, chairman of the Work and Pensions select committee, said the report highlighted worrying signs of increased stress and absence from work among staff, while hundreds of thousands of people were still being paid late each year, with vulnerable people particularly likely to struggle.

The audit office said the DWP had demonstrated a clear focus on paying more people on time and had made improvements to its systems to address problems that were blocking large numbers of payments. But the report said the DWP needed to better understand and address the needs of people with more complex claims, despite the changes to improve payment timeliness.

A DWP spokesman said: “Universal Credit is delivering in these unprecedented times, with more than 2.5m new claims processed since mid-March and over one million advances paid to those in urgent need within days. Nobody has to wait five weeks for payment.

“As the report shows, significant improvement has been made in the proportion of Universal Credit claimants receiving their first payment on time and in full – currently around 90 per cent.”