Universal Credit claim review and bank statements, how long does it take?

[AmusedKhakiSeal]

Hello, I am not sure if this is the right place for this do I apologise if not.

Im looking for some advice and a bit of reassuring lol. My partner and I receive Universal Credit. My partner works full time and I am a full time carer for a family friend. We have two children 12 and 5 years old.

Recently UC have asked us for a claim review and requested housing costs and the last 3 months of bank statements. This was just on Thursday and we sent all documents off the same day. Has anyone else had this and how long did the process take?

I ama bit anxious because my partner and I usually transfer all our money into a savings pot and then we transfer to our usual bank accounts when needed however we have absolutely no savings whatsoever. We only do this because we sometimes have subscriptions for things coming out and when we are quite skint we try to avoid keeping money in the account so these payments cant come out when we need the money, however I am worried they will see this and think we have more money than we we actually do if that makes sense?

The balance of all the accounts is shown on all the bank statements so they can see there is basically nothing in the accounts 🤣 but its not helping my anxiety as this is the first time we have gone through this and we have been on UC for quite a few years.

Any advice and reassurance would be greatly appreciated thank you.

I don' think there will be any problem with this. They are really just looking for undeclared income or other payments coming in rather than how you manage your money.

If you've sent all the statements for all the accounts they will be able to cross reference them.

I used to process benefits and was well used to people moving money around (Pensioner claims were the worst for bouncing money round and round for reasons unfathomable to me 😆).

These reviews are, as above, about checking for undeclared income such as from 'cash in hand' work or jiggery pokery with Capital.

They're not interested in what you spend or how you run things.

Thank you all. This has really put my mind at ease. Its all just made me totally anxious even though I have nothing to hide lol. Thank you again!

As long as you've uploaded statements for all your bank accounts (including savings) then the process will probably take around 1 month - 2 months max depending on the agent's caseload. Don't worry about moving your money around, as long as there's a trail of money going from one account to the other it won't be questioned.

I was really anxious before my phone call but it was fine. Over in 15 mins despite being arranged for an hour. The reviewer wanted to make sure that I didn't have other sources of income or savings, so ran through lists of things like trust funds, shares, ns&i accounts.
He had a few questions about regular payments, one to a family member, one of which he though was to a family member because he misread the statement.
Had a journal message straight away to say the review was finished.

We're going through our review for the first time. Sent all our statements mid February and had our phone call appointments today. By the time the calls ended, we already had a message in our journal saying that our claim remains the same and the review was completed.

The calls lasted about 10 minutes for each of us. Lots of questions requiring yes or no answers and then he queried a few payments on my account.