The Department of Work and Pensions is trialling a scheme that could see Universal Credit claimants at risk of losing more than £1,000 over three months.
The current rule is that those claiming the benefit meet work coaches once a week for the first three months, then go down to every two weeks after that. But the DWP is trialling an intensive two-week programme to try to get Universal Credit claimants who have been unemployed for more than three months back into the workforce.
And those who refuse to adhere to these new rules could lose their standard allowance for up to three months, potentially costing £334.91 a month, or around £1,004.73 in total, according to The Times.
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The pilot is currently running in four areas: Crawley in West Sussex, Pontefract in West Yorkshire, Partick in Glasgow and Coalville in Leicestershire, although it is not yet clear whether the programme will be rolled out nationwide if the trial is deemed to be a success.
Work and Pensions secretary Mel Stride has written to MPs in each of the trial areas explaining the reasoning behind the experiment. "Evidence shows that the longer a person is out of work the harder it is for them to return, and it is at this 13-week point that a claimant’s likelihood of securing employment begins to decrease," The Times reports.
In the UK there are currently 1.2 million people unemployed, with another nine million neither in a job or looking for one.
Mr Stride confirmed that certain people on Universal Credit were exempt from the programme, including those who are waiting for work-capability assessments, those required to do less than 35 hours a week of work search activity and those already exempt from searching for jobs.
According to The Mirror, the Government believes that the scheme could form part of a "carrot and stick" approach to encouraging people back to work, with the DWP saying it was always looking at "new" and "innovative" ways to support people with different needs to "find and succeed" in employment.
A DWP spokesperson said: "In the first half of 2022 we supported half a million benefit claimants into work and our recent changes to Universal Credit will build on this by providing hundreds of thousands more with intensive support to get better-paid work and boost long-term prospects.”
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