Universal Credit: Wage Supplements and Mini-Jobs

Abstract

Following the inconclusive result of the 2010 general election, a Conservative Party/Liberal Democrat Party coalition was formed in Britain. It was not apparent in their election manifestos (Conservative Party 2010; Liberal Democrat Party 2010) that either party was thinking of major changes to wage supplements and social security policy more generally.1 Within weeks, however, the coalition, drawing upon work by the conservative think tank the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ), had outlined plans to replace six means-tested benefits (CTC, housing benefit, income based JSA, income related Employment and Support Allowance, ESA, IS and WTC) with a single means-tested benefit (UC) as an income replacement benefit for people who were not in wage work and a wage supplement for people who were. The introduction of UC was a significant development in British social security policy in both scale (an estimated eight million households were to be affected by it — Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, 2010b) and scope (for example, in the extension of wage supplements to people in ‘mini-jobs’ and their calculation on a real-time basis).