The roll out of Universal Credit locally has led to problems for claimants, including threats of eviction.

Many families have had to be given emergency payments because their money was slow in coming through and errors in data have caused delays and uncertainty for those on the new benefit.

It has also meant long days and frustration for council staff trying to make the system work, district councillors meeting in Dorchester were told.

Benefits manager Tina Frampton said that although the system is digital not everyone is able to access services – including the majority of pensioners who claim housing benefits and families with more than three children.

“Customers with three, or more, children cannot claim Universal Credit because the software can’t cope with it at the moment,” she said, adding that those who already had two children and then another were able to continue to claim as they previously had.

There are also problems for some people in certain types of supported accommodation and the majority of landlords have opted not to receive payments direct to them because of anomalies in the accounting system.

And she revealed that the workload for local council staff has shot up – in the month the system started, December 2017, the council was getting an average of 268 digital files a day from the Department of Work and Pensions. In May the figure reached 931. Each file has to be checked and necessary adjustments made.

She said that in the first six months of the system housing benefit cases has dropped from 5,481 to 5,117 although not all of that could be attributed to Universal Credit.

Problems with the new benefit included confusion about how calculations are made’ difficulties in proving identity; delays in advance or first payments; and confusion about whether some customers should be claiming Universal Credit or Housing Benefit.

£32,000 has been paid out in discretionary housing payments since the new system started to help those who have had their payments restricted and found themselves in financial hardship, including threat of eviction.

The introduction has been helped by the Government funding two local Citizens Advice caseworkers. They offered support to 129 people in the first three months. There have also been training sessions in IT offered at local libraries by Digital Dorset and advisors from the council helping those in difficulty with budgeting advice.

“Our workload has increased significantly at the moment…the biggest issue is the quality of data we are getting, quite often we have to go back to the DWP and ask them to check what we have been sent.”

Vulnerable are affected

Dorset Echo:

Cllr Molly Rennie congratulated the council staff for coping with the introduction of the new benefit and doing what they could to help local people: “It’s nobody’s fault things go wrong, but the people who are affected are often the most vulnerable people,” she said.

Bridport councillor David Rickard highlighted problems faced by those without a regular income, such as artists and performers and who face being told, within the coming year, that a minimum income would be applied to them, whether or not they achieved that.

The committee was told that local councils might have to change their systems which deal with Local Council Tax Support for those on Universal Credit because the current system, of having to send out revised council tax calculations each month for those on the credit was unsustainable.