Source · Select Committees · Work and Pensions Committee
Recommendation 18
18
Not Addressed
Paragraph: 94
We reiterate our recommendation, first made in October 2020, that the Department should immediately make...
Recommendation
We reiterate our recommendation, first made in October 2020, that the Department should immediately make improvements to the Universal Credit system to enable it to record and use data about claimants’ characteristics. Without those improvements, the Department cannot effectively measure in real time how well the Restart and Kickstart schemes are working for different groups. The Department should set out, in response to this report, when it expects to achieve this.
Government response summary AI-generated
The government's response discusses increasing Disability Employment Advisers and reviewing their roles, but it does not address the recommendation to improve the Universal Credit system for recording claimant characteristics data or provide a timeline for such improvements.
Summary of the government's response below — read the verbatim text to verify.
Paragraph Reference:
94
Government Response
Not Addressed
HM Government · verbatim extract
Not Addressed
DWP understands why the committee thinks this would be helpful but does not have any plans to introduce markers on the Universal Credit (UC) system. Instead we are exploring ways how claimants tell us about circumstances that might affect their claim to UC. This information will then be held on their UC account so that our staff are aware of the characteristics to tailor support accordingly. DWP has introduced a mechanism for claimants to tell us about any experience of serving in the armed forces and are in the process of designing and building a process for claimants who have experience of being in care. Following this we will evaluate the impact of introducing these questions on our claimant and agent experience before deciding how we progress with other claimant characteristics. Both Kickstart and Restart programmes also have their own evaluation processes to understand how they are working for different groups.2
Read the full response on Parliament ↗