The DWP claims to have applied a ‘fix’ to the problem of employment and support allowance (ESA) claimants who are migrated to universal credit (UC) being unlawfully asked to provide fit notes.
ESA claimants should not be required to produce fit notes when they are subject to managed migrated to UC and ESA claimants in the support group should not be required to undertake any work-related activities. This is because an ESA claimant’s work capability status travels with them when they are migrated.
But, as regular readers will be aware, there have been many instances of work coaches demanding fit notes as well as trying to impose work-related requirements on former support group members during claimant commitment meetings.
On 16 October Neil Couling, the head of the DWP’s UC team admitted on X that the DWP were getting it wrong and that a “tactical fix” would soon be applied, followed by a full system fix.
On 27 November, again via X, Couling stated:
“So we deployed the new feature (fix) on Monday to allocate people, who declare as formerly in receipt of ESA, to the correct conditionality group (after a check they were on ESA). It’s a “fix forward” so cases were already in the system they will need the manual correction.”
This should mean that ESA claimants who made their claim for UC from Monday 25 November onwards will not be asked for a fit note and will be placed in the LCW or LCWRA group of UC, as appropriate.
Judging by the very small number of readers we have heard from who have received their managed migration notice over the last month, the ramping up of ESA claims to 63,000 a month by February has yet to begin.
Instead, it seems that the DWP is still in the “test and learn” phase, as it tries to ensure that the department is not deluged with problems and bad publicity when it begins to try to meet the entirely unnecessary deadline of sending all income-related ESA claimants a migration notice by the end of December 2025.
We’ll be watching carefully to see if this particular fix has actually worked,, please share your experience with other readers here.
