If the family were not on UC they would be £550 a month better off …
Better off under the Tax Credits regime brought in by Labour under Blair and Brown.
“Until last summer, Mike was a paramedic: 12 years of NHS service in a job he loved. But a freak back injury caused by helping a patient in the middle of a cardiac arrest meant he was forced to take medical retirement. His consultant calls his injury “severe lumbar disc and facet degenerative change”. For Mike, it means shooting pain, weakness, and legs that give out without warning. “Sometimes even lifting a part-filled kettle is too much,” he explains from the family home in Lowestoft.
Money is tight since he had to stop working and his wife’s wage as a teaching assistant has to stretch for them and their two teenage girls. But because they live in what’s already a universal credit area, Mike and his wife aren’t eligible for the family element of working tax credits – a bureaucratic reform that’s the difference between being able to pay the mortgage or not. If they were less than 30 miles down the road in Norwich, the family would be £550 a month better off. Instead, they’re maxing out the credit cards and reaching the bank’s overdraft.”
You cannot make something fundamentally flawed work.
“In total, a staggering eight million households are due to be transferred to the new system by the end of its rollout. This is a recipe for, at best, bureaucratic chaos and at worst, widespread economic hardship. Party politics aside, any politician worth their salt would look at the damage already being caused by universal credit’s mix of flaws and cuts and hit the pause button. Instead, the government is pressing ahead regardless. Ministers may indeed want to look away. The biggest social policy disaster in modern British politics could be coming.”
Universal credit has caused untold hardship. But the worst is yet to come
The ramblings of a former DWP Civil Servant ... 
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