Universal Credit

Question

We routinely publish reviews of Universal Credit. Testing of managed migration will commence in July 2019, before taking on larger volumes from 2020. In the first year of managed migration, we expect to only move 10,000 people. In our response the Social Security Advisory Committee on the 5th November we committed to conducting detailed Equality Assessments of migration plans. This is an iterative process and will be fully evaluated with equality impacts reassessed in accordance with the evaluation. We will publish an assessment of the impacts of managed migration prior to increasing the scale.

These include the Universal Credit Impact Assessment (December 2012) and the Universal Credit Programme Full Business Case Summary (June 2018), which sets out the rationale for Universal Credit as well as the financial impacts it is expected to have.

I will also take this opportunity to draw attention to a recent comparison between Universal Credit and the social welfare system in Finland. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) report concludes that their universal credit approach for Finland would outperform their existing system and their proposed universal basic income, in terms of reducing poverty, providing a safety net, better targeting of finite resources and improved incentives to work. The OECD report is attached to this answer.

We plan to publish a full evaluation of Universal Credit when it has been fully implemented.