The Legacy to UC Transition

November 12, 2021

We’re in the middle of the move from the Legacy Benefit to Universal Credit transition. Modelling this is tricky.

This keeps being delayed, of course, but the transition is around 60% complete.

The best source of disaggregated information on this is the House of Commons Library. They do painstaking disaggregation of the transition using information from Stat-Xplore and the HMRC Tax Credit Statistics. But reasonably enough they break down by parliamentary constituency rather than local authority, which is all the infomation I have (and that only kinda-sorta). I can see what they’re doing and am tempted to have a bash at an LA level decomposition; it would be a public service but I just don’t have the time and it’s a messy calculation. So the model uses Scotland-level averages.

It’s evident that the DWP have gone for the easy ones first:

Proportion of benefit recipients transitioned to UC, September 2021

Source House of Commons Library

Since clearly a benefit unit (or household? it’s not always clear) can be be seeking a job, and have children, a disability, and so, it’s not absolutely clear how to apply this to a micro dataset, but the module UCTransition.jl is my best effort.