Throughout the pandemic, 2 million legacy benefit claimants were denied the COVID uplift of £20 which was given to Universal Credit claimants, because the likes of the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, Thérèse Coffey, maintained that the legacy benefits system did not have the capability to apply the uplift, while simultaneously, the DWP did not have the capability to transition legacy benefit claimants across to Universal Credit with income protection.
The reason, of course, that legacy claimants are still on legacy benefits is because they were told by the DWP to wait for a process called “managed migration”, where the DWP would move them automatically.
It has long been suspected that the Tories’ “we can’t give you the COVID uplift, and we can’t move you automatically” mantra was intended to force legacy claimants to work in the blind and put in a new application for Universal Credit because the managed transition was not available. This situation would mean them not knowing how much they would be entitled to, and them losing all income protections.
However, despite representations by the Tories, including in the house of commons, I have been doing quite a bit of digging. One such bit of digging was not to take what the Tories take at face value and to confirm everything.
A few months ago, I filed a freedom of information request with the DWP asking for statistics regarding legacy benefit claimants who had been automatically transferred to universal credit using managed transition. If the Tories were being truthful about the DWP’s capabilities, the response I should have gotten was “we do not have this information”. Because how can you have stats on something that doesn’t exist?
One qwerk of how Government has to respond to FOI request refusals is that they actually have to say if they do or do not hold information AND why they are refusing the request.
Rather than receiving the “we don’t hold this information”, which is what I was expecting, the response came back that they did have the information, but that they were witholding it under Section 35 of the Freedom of Information act.
This provision of the act is designed to prevent the release of information which is for the purposes of creating Government policy.
What the Government had just done is confirm to me that there was information in existence, which led me to have the strong belief that there were in fact, a third class of people, those who were on legacy benefits and had been transferred automatically via managed transition to universal credit, and by consequence were provided with the COVID uplift.
My next step was to appeal the refusal of that FOI request, and I am happy to report that appeal succeeded and the information has been released to me.
The number of transfers are small because the transitions only operated over a number of weeks in 2019 in the Harrogate area. However, a system for managed migration DID EXIST, contrary to what the Tories told the public. The tories did have a system ready to go to transfer claimants to UC (and if you remember they managed to setup an HMRC system in only a few months for furlough). They could have easily rolled out that managed migration system UK wide because it already existed.
Rather than accelerating that process, they slammed on the brakes, blamed COVID and the increased number of UC claims, then told the world the mechanism did not exist to transfer legacy claimants to universal credit with income protection so that 2 million people would be afforded the COVID uplift like those already on UC.
