Just as Labour announced £6bn cuts, the DWP reveals it’s stripped 170,000 kids of benefits

The Labour Party government has announced potential cuts to Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) benefits of up to £6bn. The news has been met with a furious response from many. However, days before the announcement the DWP released new figures on people moving from old benefits onto Universal Credit. They show that, far from protecting people, the DWP is ensuring that hundreds of thousands of people actually lose out – including over 170,000 children.

Universal Credit: managed migration disaster

The DWP began rolling out managed migration in July 2019, as a pilot scheme. This is where the department forces people who have not yet moved to Universal Credit, either voluntarily or because of a change of circumstance, onto it. This is because the new benefit is replacing old ones like Tax Credits.

Then, the coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic hit, so the DWP had to pause its work on managed migration. In June 2022, it said that it was aiming to get everyone on old benefits onto Universal Credit by 2024.

The DWP started writing to people in July 2022. It sent them “migration notices”, telling them they needed to move to Universal Credit. In August 2023, the Canary crunched the first set of figures the DWP released around this.

We found that, at the time,

• 82% of all managed migration claimants were women, nearly all of whom were previously claiming tax credits.
• 24% of people’s claims were closed, presumably leaving them with no benefits at all.
• Of these, around 79% were women.

Fast forward to December 2024 and the latest figures show little has changed.

The DWP: stripping 160,000 kids of benefits

The latest DWP data shows that 22% of people lost their benefits due to Universal Credit’s managed migration – in total, over 330,000 people/222,000 households. The majority of these were households with children (135,000) who claimed both Child Tax Credit and Working Tax Credit.

The data shows, overall, that when you put all the different benefit combinations together, the DWP has stripped at least 170,000 children of their parent’s benefits. Also, the majority of people losing out were women.

Yet, this was all so predictable.

The Canary and the Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG) have been raising the alarm about managed migration since August 2023. At the time, we said that around 24% of people would lose their entitlements.

However, the DWP disagreed and shot us down. It told the Canary at the time that the figures weren’t representative of how managed migration would eventually pan out overall.

This is, we can now see, demonstrable bollocks.

Universal Credit: still a disaster

The DWP’s aggressive approach to Universal Credit managed migration has drawn significant criticism. The rapid transition – juxtaposed with austerity measures – suggests a systemic prioritisation of cuts over the provision of necessary support.

The complexities surrounding benefits and the urgent deadlines for transitioning only serve to compound the difficulties faced by many claimants, leading to an increasingly convoluted navigation of the benefits landscape.

Of course, the Labour Party knows all this. However, it views benefit claimants as somehow lesser than ‘working people’. Yet the DWP’s own data shows that most of the people losing out in the move to Universal Credit were indeed working.

It remains to be seen what has happened to the 170,000 children and their families now they’ve been stripped of their entitlements. Of course, to the DWP and Labour – they’ve saved money, so it’s a win-win.

Featured image via the Canary