It’s here at last, the dreaded Universal Credit.  I was informed last week that everyone will be on it by the end of February 2018 at the Charles St Jobcentre.  Hopefully I will not have to sign up to it until the beginning of February.  When you sign up to universal credit you then have to wait a full month and then another seven days before you receive your first payment.  Of course you have to inform the work coach at your first appointment that you are coming off jobseekers allowance or you will incur a seven day waiting process before your claim is dealt with.  That would leave you waiting at least six weeks for any kind of payment.  You will also have to contact your landlord if you pay rent and inform them that they will be receiving the rent on a monthly basis and in arrears.  Hopefully the landlord will accept that or you could end up living in a tent in some field.  The JSA payment part of Universal Credit will be divided into twelve equal amounts regardless of how many days are in the month so you should receive roughly £318 a month instead of the basic £146 a fortnight.   I was advised to start saving a bit every month and I will  need to if I am going to be able to pay the bills for a month with no income.  Water rates of £47 a month, tv licence and basic top up mobile besides at least five weeks of food to buy won’t be easy to save so I will need every month leading up to February.  If I’m forced to sign up before then it will become impossible to save the required amount.  I noticed that they have a phone line that has been in the news lately costing 55p a minute with an average waiting time of over ten minutes before your call is dealt with.  Five pound fifty just for waiting from a top up of ten pound a month doesn’t sound good and one person reported waiting nearly forty minutes.  That would be twenty two pound for one phone call.  

The system is clearly intended to cause as much suffering as possible.  Don’t forget that people with the best education money could buy devised Universal Credit so they knew full well the misery they were going to cause.  If you are going to spend billions on a scheme you have to have a what if  scenario in all cases so they have no excuses.   It will be interesting to find out what really happens when the 35 hours of jobsearch are expected.  If you don’t have your own computer then you might manage an hour or two at a local library.  You could go along to your local jobcentre and sit at a computer for seven hours a day for five days.  They only have around ten computers available for jobsearch so the hundreds of other jobseekers will have to hope they are not sanctioned.   Of course the reality is that you wouldn’t be allowed to sit at a computer all day not just because of the obvious health problems you would eventually incur.   They won’t allow you to eat or drink in jobcentres so dehydration would be a big problem.  The 35 hours jobsearch is supposed to be a two way discussion between you and your work coach.  In my experience I have met many decent people who work at jobcentres but I have also met a number of people who would love to sanction as many people as they could.  Don’t forget they do what they are told by the manager who will always defend them and at the same time provide lip service as in trying to calm the situation even though they are just trying to reach targets.  Targets such as how many people to sanction.   Many people don’t even bother to fight sanctions but quite a number win appeals. 

Whatever you do, never threaten or insult anyone at a jobcentre.  Keep calm and appeal if you are sanctioned, it’s important that you keep avenues open to you because contact with the jobcentre is important.  The last thing you want is to be banned from the jobcentre and probably the first thing I would do is contact my member of parliament.  It’s easy to email them and you usually receive a reply in twenty four hours.