Cancelling a Universal Credit claim, and when not to

DWP's own advice is to report the change rather than close the claim yourself. If you get a job, start working more hours, recover from a health condition or leave the country, report it in your online account. DWP then works out whether you are still entitled, checks whether it owes you anything for the period you have already been through, and closes the claim at the right point if entitlement has ended. You get a text or an email when that happens. Closing it yourself skips those checks. It is the difference between a claim that ends tidily with any final payment made and a claim you have switched off in the middle of an assessment period. Reporting also keeps the record straight, because the date you told DWP is what decides, later, whether any overpayment was avoidable.

There are three routes and they all work. Leave a message in your journal saying you want the claim closed. Use the request to close your claim option on your account homepage. Or ring the Universal Credit helpline. Before you use any of them, be clear about why. Closing a claim is not the way to stop a deduction, pause a work search requirement, deal with a work coach you do not get on with or protest a decision you disagree with. None of those problems are solved by ending the claim, and a deduction for an advance or an overpayment continues to be recovered by DWP Debt Management whether you claim or not. If the reason you want out is the work search requirements, raise that with your work coach first. A commitment can be changed for health, caring or a temporary crisis without ending the claim.

If your earnings in an assessment period rise above the point where an award is payable, you get nothing that month, but the claim itself stays live. If your wages fall back far enough for you to be entitled again within five months, the payments restart automatically with no new application. After five months you have to apply again from the beginning. That five month window is the reason not to close a claim the first time a bonus, a busy month or a fourth payday in a period wipes out an award. Leave it alone and it heals itself. Close it and you have thrown the window away. There is one caveat. Earnings a long way above your limit can be carried into the following period as surplus earnings, which delays the restart until they are used up. That is a delay rather than a closure, and the window still runs.

A fresh claim starts a fresh assessment period from the day you claim, so the first payment is roughly five weeks away again: one month of assessment, then 7 days. You verify your identity again, agree a claimant commitment again, and evidence your rent and childcare again. If you need money in the meantime it comes as an advance, repaid over up to 24 months out of the payments that follow. And there is no transitional protection on a claim you make voluntarily, so if your circumstances have changed in the gap the new award simply reflects them. Almost none of that applies if the original claim was still open. The paperwork is the smaller cost. The real one is the gap, because a household that has just lost an income is rarely in a position to absorb five weeks of nothing.

Three checks. First, is there a payment still owed for the assessment period you are in, which reporting the change rather than closing would have secured? Second, is anything else attached to the claim that ends with it, for instance a payment going straight to a landlord or a third party deduction arrangement you rely on? Third, are you certain the income replacing it is stable? If a job is on probation, temporary or seasonal, the five month restart window is worth more than the tidiness of a closed claim. If you are unsure, a free welfare rights service will look at the numbers with you before you do anything irreversible. Whatever you decide, write it in the journal in your own words on the day you decide it, so the record shows what you asked for and when.