Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, with reference to The Universal Credit (Earned Income) Amendment Regulations 2020, what assessment her Department has made of the potential impact of moving double-paydays to subsequent assessment periods on (a) working Universal Credit recipients and (b) resourcing within her Department; and what steps she is taking to reduce the impact on (i) claimants and (ii) resources.

The Department recognised the impact that having double earnings in an assessment period can have on individual households and their ability to manage their finances and that is why we made the regulations changes. The amendment allows the Department to reallocate a payment of earnings reported via the Real Time Information (RTI) service to a different Universal Credit assessment period, either because it was reported in the wrong assessment period or (in the case of calendar monthly paid employees) it is necessary to maintain a regular payment cycle. This will also enable certain claimants to benefit from any applicable work allowance in each assessment period.

Those claimants who are paid two sets of monthly earnings in one assessment period are usually identified by an automated system that corrects the Universal Credit award. However, there are a small number of claimants who are not automatically identified and will need to be manually identified, this work has been absorbed by a multi-skilled centralised team and is resourced flexibly to meet demand. This only generally applies to a very small proportion of claimants and applies equally to all claimants.