Harrogate’s great migration: why the leafy district has been chosen to trial Universal Credit

However, there is more to the district than the flowers in the town centre. Its 505 square miles include the Bilton & Woodfield ward, which ranked in the poorest 10% in the 2015 English indices of deprivation.

Still, according to official job market statistics, the unemployment rate in Harrogate is just 3%, compared with the British average of 4.2%, with 85.1% of people in the town economically active versus 78.5% nationally.

Residents in work earn £603.70 a week on average, comfortably more than the £571.10 taken home in the rest of the country. Just 9.2% of the district’s homes are social housing, while across England the proportion is 17%.

“It was very smart to go with Harrogate for the pilot – it was an easy win,” remarks Graham Stygall, rent manager at 6,000-home local housing association Broadacres. “We’d be in a very different set of circumstances in a city with a lot of unemployment.”

Gareth Roebuck, senior income services manager at regional provider Yorkshire Housing, agrees. “There’s no doubt this would be more testing for everyone if this pilot was happening in an inner city. Had it been in a large city, I think we would have got very different outcomes.”

Then again, the area does pose some challenges. According to the council, housing costs here are the least affordable in the North of England.

Other factors will be at play, too. Mr Roebuck, who works across Yorkshire, praises the “brilliant” local DWP and Jobcentre Plus staff. And Universal Credit first arrived in Harrogate in 2014, while the full service commenced in June 2016.

It has been a pilot area three times for various stages of Universal Credit roll-out, meaning organisations here are among the most experienced at assisting claimants.

For its part, the DWP has been keeping its cards close to its chest: it was unable to answer questions about how the managed migration pilot – or “move to UC”, as the government now calls it – will actually work.

Harrogate’s Job Centre Plus will have a dedicated Universal Credit phoneline to help with the migration

Nevertheless, Inside Housing has managed to gather some details. First, it is understood that the department wants the pilot to commence on 17 July, although that could slip if there is a delay to the parliamentary vote on the regulations, for which there is still no date.

Estimates for how many people in Harrogate could move to Universal Credit vary between about 3,000 and 5,000, although it is widely agreed the area will not hit the 10,000 threshold accounted for in Universal Credit legislation.

In any case, residents will not all wake up one morning and find themselves on Universal Credit – far from it, in fact. The DWP is thought to be planning initially to ask people to switch to the new system voluntarily, with the option offered at work-focused interviews at the job centre. Housing association sources suggested that only around 100 claimants are expected to move over by December – although when this was put to the DWP, it denied having plans to move over a certain number of people by a given date.

“The DWP is thought to be planning initially to ask people to switch to the new system voluntarily, with the option offered at work-focused interviews at the job centre”

It is understood that measures to encourage a gentler transition will be put in place. For instance, there will be a dedicated phoneline at the job centre for those migrating, avoiding the need to call the main Universal Credit helpline. In a change from the regulations, the DWP will not cut off benefits three months after people are told to make a Universal Credit claim. Furthermore, there will be an appeals system for the “transitional protections” – that is, the top-up payments for people whose benefits will be reduced once they move to Universal Credit. This is significant, because calculating entitlement to benefits is often a minefield.

Most people subject to the benefits cap will be included in the pilot, although not the most severely affected, such as those whose entire housing costs would be wiped out by the threshold. Beyond the volunteers, it is unclear how the managed migration will work. Some may wonder, of course, just how many people are likely to sign up – and whether low interest could foreshadow further delays to the roll-out of Universal Credit, which is already six years behind schedule. Others are likely to applaud a cautious approach.

Neither Mr Stygall nor Mr Roebuck are particularly concerned by the pilot. Both their organisations own around 200 homes in Harrogate, but Broadacres has just 28 households still on the older benefits system, while Yorkshire Housing has no more than 40. This is largely down to Universal Credit’s long presence in the area.

Harrogate Housing Association, a 200-home outfit with all its stock in the area, is equally untroubled. “We only have about 30 customers on housing benefit that we know of,” says operations manager Angela Aldis. “There’s nothing about the pilot that would raise an issue that we would need to gear up for.”

Charlotte Fortune, who works with some of the district’s most vulnerable people as hostel service manager at the Harrogate Homeless Project, says: “I actually think it could be positive. In the hostel right now, there are only two people out of 16 still on legacy benefits, so I believe we can support them effectively.” It is also likely that as the first migrators will be volunteers, they will be at the less destitute end of the scale.

The nature of managed migration means this pilot may prove easier to handle than when tenants start claiming Universal Credit through natural migration. “At the moment, we have to react when someone switches on to Universal Credit, but for the managed migration, we know it’s coming so we can plan for it,” explains Mr Stygall. “We know who’s going to be migrated over, so we’re really able to aim those services at those people, to offer them in-depth support.”