Universal Credit: What you need to know

Please note: the 2nd edition is due in spring 2013. To order in advance, please call us on 020 7837 7979 or download the order form.

Universal credit will be a complete change to the system of financial support for people of working age. The new system is still being designed but much is already known about how it is expected to work. This new guide includes what is currently known about universal credit, with CPAG commentary and analysis. It is the first in our new series of “essentials” guides, designed to help you get to grips with new and important issues in social security.

Contents include:

• Who will be able to claim?
• How to make a claim
• How much will you get?
• What will you be expected to do?
• When can you be given a financial penalty?
• What if there is a problem?
• Universal credit and other benefits
• How universal credit will affect certain people

Advisers are already asking how universal credit will affect their clients. Our aim in publishing this first edition is to provide answers that are available so far, and help you prepare for the major upheaval that universal credit will bring. We plan further editions once more detail becomes known about how universal credit will work.

This guide supplements the universal credit information in our main Welfare Benefits and Tax Credits Handbook. The guide aims to be an accessible “essentials” guide rather than a detailed guide to the law.

Published to coincide with the Welfare Reform Bill being passed in Parliament, it draws on CPAG’s extensive work on the Bill to make an informed assessment of how the new system will work, and what problems may arise. The authors are a group of highly experienced advisers from CPAG’s welfare rights team.

166 pages March 2012   978 1 906076 60 3   £10.00

Downloads

Download a sample from Universal credit: what you need to know [139 kb pdf file]