Universal credit managed migration - the age of discovery
Owen Stevens reviews the background to the current plans to ‘managed migrate’ recipients of legacy benefits to universal credit.
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.
1DWP, Explanatory Memorandum for the Social Security Advisory Committee: The Universal Credit (Transitional Provisions) Amendment Regulations 2022, 8 December 2021, available at gov.uk; ‘Estimating entitlement analysis’, Completing the Move to Universal Credit, DWP Policy Paper, 6 June 2022, available at The DWP has research showing that the planned managed migration process risks causing and exacerbating vulnerability.
2paras 7 and 8, ‘Move to UC Update’, UC Programme Board paper, 16 April 2019, available at Both the Social Security Advisory Committee (SSAC)
3SSAC reports and correspondence, November and December 2018, available at and the Work and Pensions Select Committee
4House of Commons Work and Pensions Committee, Universal Credit: managed migration, HC 1762, 22 November 2018, and Universal Credit: tests for managed migration, HC 2019, 1 May 2019, available at 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‘Universal Credit: personal welfare’, speech by Amber Rudd, Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, 11 January 2019; ‘Move to UC Update’, UC Programme Board paper, 16 April 2019 (see note 2) 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‘Universal Credit’, Written Statement UIN HCWS1399, 12 March 2019, available at The DWP had planned to engage at least 5,000 people in the pilot, through a mix of engagement methods, before returning to parliament.
7para.12, ‘Move to Universal Credit Update’, UC Programme Board Paper, 18 February 2020, available at 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‘Universal Credit: Harrogate’, Written Answer UIN HL639, 04 July 2022, and Written Answer UIN HL640, 23 June 2022, available at questions-statements.parliament.uk; Response to FOI request, IR2021/99324, 13 April 2022, available at 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.
9Tax Credits and Some Benefits are Ending: claim universal credit, DWP guidance, 29 June 2022, available at 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).
10DWP, The Universal Credit (Transitional Provisions) Amendment Regulations 2022: report by SSAC and statement by the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, July 2022 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.
11Correspondence from Secretary of State for Work and Pensions to the Chair of the Work and Pensions Committee, 17 May 2022, available at 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 minutes
12SSAC, ‘Minutes of the meeting held on 8 December 2021’, available at and was unwilling to publicly discuss policies on vulnerable claimants with the Work and Pensions Select Committee.
13House of Commons Work & Pensions Committee, Oral evidence, HC549, 29 June 2022, Q93 and Q132Evaluation 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‘Move to UC Pilot’, UC Programme Board paper, 12 November 2019, available at 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’.
15SSAC, ‘Minutes of the meeting held on 8 December 2021’, available at 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).
16SSAC, ‘Minutes of the meeting held on 8 December 2021’, Annexes D-F, available at 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.
17DWP, The Universal Credit (Transitional Provisions) Amendment Regulations 2022: report by SSAC and statement by the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, July 20227What 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.
18The Universal Credit (Transitional Provisions) Amendment Regulations 2022, No.752The 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.
19Early Day Motion 319, tabled on 20 July 2022, available at The House of Lords Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee has drawn the regulations to the special attention of the House.
20House of Lords Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee, 10th Report of Session 2022-23, HL Paper 56, 21 July 2022, available at publications.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.
Future editions of the Bulletin will cover the process by which people will be managed migrated to UC.