Well I had nothing else to do on a wet Sunday afternoon.
Joking aside I decided that the time was right for me, and so this afternoon I completed an online claim for UC.
It's something I had been considering for a while.
It may not be for you, check and take advice before doing it yourself.
If you have the Severe Disability Premium with any benefit then don't even consider claiming UC yourself (unless you have to) - you WILL lose money.
It wasn't that difficult and took about 45 minutes overall.
About 15 minutes of that was me failing the online verification.
I knew it would fail, no passport or driving licence, and I could have just skipped it to save time but I wanted to see what it entailed.
They tried Government Gateway first (I thought that was obsolete now?) and then GOV.Verify but i didn't even create an account for that.
All that means is that ID verification will have to be done another way, probably a visit to the jobcentre.
It did ask about benefits in the 'Income' section but didn't go into any details of what benefits were currently being claimed.
Presumably they will get to that later, or just check their records.
Although asking about Housing Costs (rent) it didn't ask if I was currently claiming HB.
Presumably they will check all that with the HA and the council.
So overall pretty painless up to now, let's see what happens next.
I'll probably write more later about just why I chose to change to UC now, but right now I'm off to the pub for a bit of socialising.
