UNIVERSAL CREDIT ‘CLAIMANT COMMITMENT’: NO CHOICE, NO LAW, NO MONEY – NO APPEAL

The Claimant Commitment will be developed through a face to face interview with an adviser.  The interview will cover 4 core elements leading to a set of requirements to be recorded in a Claimant Commitment. These are:  
Diagnosis    of    claimant    capability and circumstance
Identifying the work a claimant is expected to look and be available for
Establishing which work search, preparation and availability requirements should apply
Establishing ongoing contact requirements

These will enable the adviser to develop and record a set of requirements that, if complied with, will give claimants the best prospects of finding work. Diagnosis of claimant capability and circumstance to support claimants get into as much work as they can as quickly as possible, advisers will determine a claimant’s capability and personal circumstances (including exploring work history, qualifications, health and caring responsibilities) . This will ensure the claimant is placed in the correct conditionality group and that all relevant circumstances are taken into account.  

Identifying the work a claimant is expected to look and be available forThe adviser will identify a job requirement that sets out the work a claimant is expected to look for and accept if offered. The adviser will establish the type, location, hours and pattern of work a claimant will be expected to look and be available for.  Claimants will normally be expected to look for any suitable employment, paying the relevant national minimum wage,  that is within 1.5 hours travelling distance from their home.  Claimants will also be expected to look for full time work.

Setting requirements to give claimants the best prospects of finding work

By the end of the process , the intention is that the claimant is committed to complying with their requirements and motivated to find work. In setting requirements, the adviser will – working with the claimant – set out a detailed action plan, articulating the steps a claimant must take to give themselves the best prospects of finding a job.  

However, this is not a consistent picture - we heard from several stakeholders and consultees that not all work coaches are using discretion fairly or reasonably and opt for generic, rather than tailored, actions. We saw examples of work coaches copying and pasting actions from a shared document, which had become standard in their local Jobcentre and many of the claimant commitments we sampled had generic requirements. We also heard of work coaches recommending inappropriate courses and work search actions given the local labour market and some coaches using rules of thumb (for example reducing the hours requirement to 16 hours automatically if a claimant had previously claimed a disability benefit) to define actions instead of truly tailoring. This is perhaps understandable, given the pressures referred to above that work coaches face, but is not giving claimants bespoke plans.

Principle 4: Accepted- A claimant commitment should be accepted by both parties. There should also be a clear challenge process available to claimants who do not agree on the content of their commitment. We heard from several stakeholders, including some work coaches, that many claimants feel obliged to accept their commitments just to get UC payments. So even if a claimant disagreed with the requirements set out in their commitment, they may feel unable to challenge it because it would mean adding further potential delay, above the five week wait for the first UC payment that all claimants face as a minimum.

Claimants are entitled to a second opinion if they disagree with their commitment, but we heard that not all claimants are aware of their right to do so. In one Jobcentre there had been no second opinions sought in the two years that the team leader had worked there. While this doesn’t prove there is a problem, it is reasonable to expect at least some challenges given the scope for human error in a personalised, discretion-based system

J3040 The Secretary of State can require that a claimant take particular action for the purpose of making it more likely that the claimant will obtain 1. paid work or 2. more paid work or 3. better-paid work
1. This is known as the work preparation requirement.

Claimants with physical and mental health problems were less likely than other claimants to feel that their commitment reflected their circumstances.31One consultee highlighted an online survey of disabled people on UC which found only a quarter felt their work coach had taken account of their impairment or condition in planning activities. When they raised this with their work coach, a third felt they 30 We didn’t collect enough evidence to make a fair assessment of whether requirements were tailored to the needs of the labour market, so the focus in this section is whether requirements were tailored to the needs of each claimant.31 DWP (2018), Universal Credit full-service survey.

Claimant said they were not listened to, while less than a third felt they were. Failing to take impairments into account would be in breach of the Equality Act 2010.

Aside from the tailoring of the level of conditionality, we also found a lack of tailoring of activities. Many of the claimant commitments we saw both in Jobcentres and the sample provided by the Department had a range of generic requirements, for instance around signing up to and using a jobsite.

DWP’s full-service survey found only a half of claimants had their conditionality reviewed in the previous three months.34 Many stakeholders described review meetings as a tick box exercise, where commitments were not reviewed and many of the commitments in our sample had limited evidence of being updated. For example, several had “sign up to jobsite” still on the commitment several months after the claim had started
We also heard that some claimants experiencing mental health problems find interacting with work coaches very stressful. One claimant said they just accept the commitment to enable them to “get away as quickly as possible. I say yes, yes, yes, to make it be over quicker.” We also heard of claimants feeling obliged to accept their commitment because the power imbalance between the work coach and claimant leaves the claimant too scared to challenge their commitment. And some claimants with learning disabilities may struggle to truly understand and so meaningfully accept their commitment.