The DWP has now stripped over 150,000 CHILDREN of benefits due to Universal Credit migration

The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has now stripped more than 318,000 people of their benefits via the managed migration process. Alarmingly, the DWP is leaving disproportionately impacting women through its forced migration process to Universal Credit – as well as a huge number of households with children.

Of course, the Canary’s Steve Topple first highlighted that this would likely be the case well over a year ago. Once again, the latest statistics have proven the Canary’s warnings were, unfortunately, correct.

DWP Universal Credit: more mayhem with its so-called managed migration

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.

Specifically, this forced migration involves the DWP issuing notices, with a three month deadline for claimants to make the move to Universal Credit. It officially began this process in July 2022. Since then, the department has progressively stripped claimants of their benefits.

Previously, the Canary has calculated the staggering number of people the DWP had been denying benefits to through this.

Most recently, in August, the Canary’s Steve Topple crunched the numbers running up to June 2024 and found that:

• 1,140,810 people had been sent managed migration notices from July 2022 to June 2024.
• 284,660 people had lost their benefits (24.9%).
• 165,720 were women (58.2%).
• 99% were Tax Credits claimants – and of those, 32% of the total number of Tax Credits claimants lost their benefits.

And as he pointed out, this was roughly as he had projected a year prior, using statistics at that time.

More than 318,000 people lose their benefits

So now, the figures are once more following along these same lines. On 12 November, the DWP released its latest Universal Credit managed migration statistics. The data goes up to the end of September 2024. This showed that:

• The DWP had sent a total of 1,369,367 individuals, or 943,343 households migration notices between June 2022 and September 2024.
• 318,834 people had lost their benefits (29%)
• 185,076 were women (58%)
• 69% of these were Child Tax Credit or working Tax Credit claimants

Obviously, the data shows that the forced move has disproportionately left women without benefits.

On top of this, the data revealed that the DWP has stripped benefits from 151,927 households with children. In other words, it means at least 150k children have seen their parents lose their benefits in the process of the DWP’s mandatory migration.

Before it even began its roll-out, the parliamentary Work and Pensions select committee (WPSC) warned the process could leave many claimants destitute.

Get its own misogynistic house in order

And notably, it also means that the DWP has denied benefits to more old-style claimants than it had estimated too. In November 2023, it calculated that it would leave 26% of Tax Credit claimant households, and 4% of households on other benefits, without social security.

However, it has turned out to be much higher than this. It transpired that the DWP has now in fact stripped 30% of Tax Credit claimant households of their benefits.

Meanwhile, it’s not possible to fully compare the DWP’s prediction for other legacy benefit types. The reason for this is that the department only provides the information on other old-style benefits also in combination with Tax Credits. This figure showed that the DWP has stopped benefits for 11,216 households – or 3.39%.

Overall, the point is, the DWP has ignored all the warnings from the start. Now, the new Labour government has continued with the roll-out. This is despite repeated red flags at every new statistic release over the past year. Knowing that the process had already stripped more than 180,000 people of their benefits as it entered government, it could have paused this.

Instead, it seems committed to ploughing ahead – and now, more than 300,000 people – mostly women, and many households with children, are losing out. So not only is it refusing to lift the two child limit on benefits, it’s actually continuing to strip women and households with children of their benefits altogether.

It also comes after the government boasted about its Child Poverty Taskforce gearing up to tackle the causes of child poverty. Evidently though, the Labour-led DWP needs to get its own house in order first – because there’s clearly a systemic problem with the Universal Credit managed migration process, and the misogynistic DWP at large.

Featured image via the Canary