Anyone with knowledge of universal credit?

[SpunBodgeSquarepants]

Help me - I'm so worried right now. I'm a single parent and my son turned 5 in March which meant my income support stopped and I had to change over to UC and also start looking for work. I did eventually find a job within school hours for 3 days a week - it's 15 hours per week and the pay is £585 per month. I love this job and the people and I really don't want to leave, however today I had a message in my journal to say I had to agree to commitments before I would get my next UC payment. My commitments state 'I will do everything I can to find work that pays more'. Are they telling me if I continue with this job they will sanction me??

Didn't you have to agree your available hours when you first claimed?

You could carry on applying for jobs within those hours 'unsuccessfully', IYSWIM.

Anyway have a bump. There's bound to be a UC expert along soon

With UC, are you not supposed to work 25 hours (or 23?) a week or earn the equivalent of 25 hours at minimum wage once you have school age children? Something to do with the category you’re in...

My friend is a new single mum with a 6 year old. She was a sahm before her husband left. She was told that because her child is in full time education they expect her to work at least 24 hours a week. Any less than this and she would still have to go see her work coach and look for more hours.

Shit, you're all right. I was under the impression that any work was better than no work....

So you need 23/24/25 hours pw of NMW? Isn't that called something like your income floor?

Is your current job paid at NMW or a bit higher?

Two easy things to try would be to ask your current employer for extra hours or to register for lunchtime temping on your two free weekdays. Either of those sound promising?

If £585 is your wage PCM, you're earning £9ph, so that's slightly above NMW, which helps.

You'll just have to attend every appointment and actively show you're job searching for more hours. If you don't comply with that then you'll be sanctioned.

The whole point of UC was to make service users actively search for work on a very regular basis and prove that you are doing so. It's not quite the same as Job seekers.

I don’t know anything about this but seems unfair, so can someone that says earns 20 pounds an hour have to do half the amount of hours that someone on min wage does ?

Speak to your work coach ASAP. I only work 16hrs but because it's a stable job (and pennies over NMW but certainly not equal to 25 hours on minimum wage) it's fine. If you explain that you're settled and there may be chance of promotion/pay rises (even if there's not you can hint that there is) they'll probably leave you alone. This is one of the benefits of UC over legacy benefits, it's more personalised so they can make these allowances whereas before it was literally a case of 'computer says no'