16 January 2019

Recent legislation

Alongside the various announcements, several pieces of legislation have been published this week.

These rules introduce a ‘Gateway Condition’ so that claimants who are receiving a Severe Disability Premium (SDP) included in their benefit award will not claim UC if they need to make a new claim for support, but will remain on existing benefits until they are moved to Universal Credit as part of the  managed migration process. The rules are effective from 16 January 2019.

This amends the State Pension Credit Act and means that from 15 May 2019, mixed age couples (where one member of a couple has reached theri qualifying age for state pension and the other memeber of the couple has not), can no longer make a new claim for pension credit, (exceptions apply). Mixed-age couples from that date who want to claim income-related support will be expected to claim UC instead.

These draft regulations cover the managed migration pilot and allow for the migration of 10, 000 awards from legacy benefits to UC, outline the process for migration. including the calculation of the transitional protection element, introduce discretional hardship payments from July 2019 for those going through managed migration and introduce the 2 week run-on payments of income support, IB-JSA and IR-ESA from July 2020.