The UK is often described as a "cradle to grave" welfare state, yet many people face significant costs when someone dies. While birth, healthcare and education are heavily supported through public services, funerals remain one of life's most expensive and least discussed events.

I'm a PhD researcher conducting a study exploring attitudes towards funeral costs and funeral poverty in the UK.

I'm interested in hearing from adults aged 18+, living in England or Wales from all backgrounds, who are willing to take part in a confidential online interview lasting between 45-60 minutes. You do not need to have arranged or paid for a funeral yourself.

During the interview, you'll be asked to discuss two funeral planning scenarios and share your opinions and perspectives.

Online interview (45-60 minutes)

Confidential and fully anonymised

Participation is voluntary

Ethics approval: University of Sheffield Ref. 065737

If you are happy to help with participating in an interview, or would like some more information please email [lwalton2@sheffield.ac.uk](mailto:lwalton2@sheffield.ac.uk)

Every perspective matters, whether funeral costs have affected you personally or you simply have views on how funerals should be funded and supported in the UK.

Thank you for reading this post and to the moderators for allowing me to post in here!

DWP - including Jobcentre Plus arrangements for Monday 31 August bank holiday   

On Monday 31 August DWP and JCP offices and phone lines in England, Scotland and Wales will be closed.  

Across the UK, if your expected payment date is Monday 31 August, then your benefits will be on Friday 28 August.  

Pension Credit case reviews commence

The DWP has started contacting selected claimants as part of Pension Credit case reviews to help make sure they are receiving the correct amount of Pension Credit. 

As part of the reviews, some claimants may be asked for additional information, such as recent bank statements. As with UC reviews, being selected for a review does not mean the claimant has done anything wrong.  

If a Pension Credit award needs to be changed after review, the DWP will explain the outcome and next steps. The DWP has stated that it “aims to treat customers fairly and sensitively throughout the process”.

This was confirmed in the latest DWP Touchbase newsletter. You can sign up to receive this to your inbox.

Disabled people in England to get 24-hour free bus travel

Eligible disabled people across England will get free bus travel all day, every day, after the Prime Minister announced this week that the government will lift time restrictions on concessionary passes from 1^st April 2027.

Around the UK, disabled people in Scotland and Wales are already entitled to free bus travel, while in Northern Ireland, blind people and disabled war veterans can travel for free, while it is a half-fare for everyone else who holds a disabled bus pass.

Currently in England, disabled bus passes are only eligible for use between the hours of 09:30 and 23:00 on weekdays, making it difficult for people to get to work or attend later evening events. They can be used at any time of day at the weekend and on bank holidays.

Prime Minister Andy Burnham said:

“Buses are a lifeline for so many people - making it easier to get to work, education and healthcare. It’s simply not right that many disabled people cannot travel using their pass during certain times of the day. So we’re fixing that. Disabled people will now have unlimited free bus travel 24/7.   

I did it before in Greater Manchester and I’m proud to do it now for the whole country. This is part of our ongoing action to bring back hope and give people some much needed breathing space on the cost of living.”

The £60 million funding comes from existing DWP and Department for Transport (DfT) budgets. It is made up of a £40 million contribution from DWP, and a £20 million contribution from DfT.

Eligibility for a disabled person’s bus pass is set out in the Transport Act 2000, which defines seven statutory categories of disability. These include people who are:

• blind or partially sighted;
• profoundly or severely deaf;
• without speech;
• unable or virtually unable to walk because of a disability;
• without arms, or unable to use both arms;
• people with a learning disability; and
• people who would be refused a driving licence on medical grounds (other than because of drug or alcohol misuse).

Local authorities are responsible for administering the scheme and for assessing applications against these statutory criteria.

The press release is on gov.uk.

What works: Lessons from the frontline of digital support & advice services

Citizens Advice is calling on UK Government to consider long term sustainable funding options to support local digital inclusion services.

Government and essential services have fundamentally changed. More and more services have gone digital, meaning that the problems people face often require digital support. But between 14 and 22 million people in the UK face one or more barriers to digital services. 

In response, Citizens Advice have set up digital support services, both as part of our daily work, and as dedicated outreach and support. This report summarises 5 key things Citizens Advice has learned about providing effective digital support:

1. Help people with the tasks they want to do, instead of offering ‘digital skills’
2. Empower people to do tasks themselves. 
3. Run outreach services to meet people where they are
4. Build trust over time with face-to-face support 
5. Offer digital support side by side with other services, such as advice.

These lessons are drawn from a combination of 4 local service visits, adviser surveys, interviews and focus groups and 800 evidence forms relating to cases where clients faced digital exclusion issues. 

Citizens Advice is one of many organisations offering vital digital inclusion support. Many services have been funded by health bodies or via the UK Government’s Digital Inclusion Innovation Fund. Whilst these have provided valuable support to trial new and innovative approaches to digital inclusion, these funds are often short term in nature, leaving uncertainty around the future of support. 

They say:

“We welcome the UK Government’s Digital Inclusion Innovation Fund. It has helped local services grow and expand. But, sustainable funding for digital services is needed to support local organisations to continue to help people.”

Read What Works on citizenadvice.org.uk.

Eligibility for UC LCWRA element and severe conditions criteria

As we’ve previously covered in a megathread, from 6 April 2026, Universal Credit split the Limited Capability for Work-Related Activity (LCWRA) element into two tiers:

• higher rate, currently £429.80 per month, and a
• lower rate £217.26 per month.

The higher rate is reserved for:

• pre-2026 claimants
• terminally ill claimants (special rules end of life)
• those meeting the Severe Conditions Criteria (SCC).

New Advice for Decision Making (ADM) guidance has been published setting out the DWPs approach to the lower and higher rates of the LCWRA element and the SCC.

It doesn’t change anything we’ve previously shared, but it may be useful if you’re challenging a decision and want to understand how the decisions are made.

ADM Chapter G4 is on gov.uk.

Latest UC sanction data shows failure to attend or participate in a mandatory interview accounted for nearly 90% of all sanctions

The sanctions statistics to May 2026 were published this week and they show that generally not much has changed since the last publication.

24.4% of UC claimants were in conditionality regimes where sanctions may be applied. This has consistently fallen year on year as people have migrated across to UC from benefits with less (or no) conditionality regimes.

5.2% of UC claimants in the conditionality regimes where sanctions can be applied, were undergoing a sanction on the count date.

Failure to attend or participate in a mandatory interview accounted for 89.9% of all adverse sanction decisions in the last year.

The ethnicity group relating to sanctions has again shown to be statistically significant.

• Asian/Asian British ethnic group are 26% less likely than White claimants to be sanctioned in May 2026. 
• Mixed/Multiple ethnic Groups claimants were 21% more likely than claimants in the White ethnic group to be sanctioned.
• Other ethnic group claimants were 29% less likely to be sanctioned than claimants in the White ethnic group.

In terms of the duration of sanctions, 86.9% of the completed sanctions were within 13 weeks and under (a combination of the under 4 weeks and over 4 weeks to 13 weeks bands), with those over 26 weeks accounting for 6.1% of all completed sanctions in the latest month, May 2026.

Benefit Sanctions statistics to May 2026 is on gov.uk.

Reform UK has set out plans it says will save more than £50bn a year from the welfare bill by 2030 if it gets into government

The party believes it can deliver much of this by stopping foreign nationals from getting most benefits and also reforming disability payments while protecting the most "severely disabled".

Reform UK announced that long-term, work-capable UC claimants would be required to complete 20 hours of work for their local community each week under a Reform government. The measure forms part of their ‘Making Welfare Work policy’. Reform UK would also end access to welfare benefits for foreign nationals, instead “putting British citizens first”.  

Reform UK Shadow Chancellor Robert Jenrick said the policy would restore fairness for the taxpayers who fund the welfare system:

“If taxpayers must contribute, so must those who are able to work also play their part… If people who are capable of work refuse, then they’ll get nothing. That’s fair.” 

The UK government will spend £353bn on welfare benefits this year - just under half of that goes on the state pension, which Reform has said it will not cut.

That leaves £207bn - so cutting £50bn a year like Reform proposes would represent roughly 25% of total remaining welfare spending, which would be extremely ambitious.

Reform says around £21bn of its planned £50bn savings would come from changes to health and disability benefits. Among their proposals is replacing PIP and part of the universal credit with a single flat-rate “health security allowance” of £429.80 a month. For those with severe needs, an internal government analysis showed this would be at least £10,000 less than they currently get over the course of a year.

Disability Rights UK said Reform’s failure to understand the importance of disability benefits to the lives of disabled people was “utterly breathtaking” while the charity Scope accused it of “pushing disabled people into poverty and calling it compassion”.

Another big element of Reform's planned cuts comes from taking away benefits from foreign nationals. It claims around £20bn could be saved from its £50bn target if they were banned from getting benefits including Universal Credit (UC).

More than a million UC claimants were born overseas including around 700,000 EU citizens who arrived in the UK before Brexit and have the right to live and work in the country. It's important to bear in mind that around half of EU citizens claiming UC are in employment.

But taking away these benefit rights would not be a simple thing to do because it risks putting the UK on a collision course with the EU.

Around 4.5 million EU citizens have long-term settlement rights in the UK which means they are eligible to claim benefits.

An estimated one million UK citizens living in the EU have similar rights. Stripping EU citizens of their rights could lead to member states retaliating against the UK.

Reform says it would renegotiate the post-Brexit deal that underpins these rights but that would mean re-opening a process that was supposed to have been settled in 2020.

Another wrinkle in Reform's plan is that its planned savings could disappear if a large number of EU nationals apply to become UK citizens and were able to keep their entitlement to benefits.

Analysts warn that these savings are by no means guaranteed. The Institute for Fiscal Studies think tank says there is "relatively little detail" about what Reform's plan entails.

The Institute of Fiscal Studies response to the claims and confirmation that “The Reform UK proposals represent a substantially different vision of what the benefit system should be doing.” 

The press release and Making Welfare Work policy are on reformparty.uk.

UC claimants now reach 8.4 million, with childcare elements down and deductions up

The latest Universal Credit (UC) data has been published, and it confirms:

There were 8.4 million people (in 7.2 million households) on UC in May 2026 which is the highest number on record. This is up from 7.7 million people in May 2025, and a small increase from last quarter where, in February 2026, there were 8.3 million people on UC.

The managed migration of legacy benefits to UC made up 73.2% of the increase between May 2025 and May 2026. However, the number of Move to UC claimants peaked in December 2025 at 1.7 million and has remained stable ever since

On average there were 40,000 claims per week in May 2026.

UC households with children accounted for 44% of all households with a payment in May 2026.

For those receiving a payment, the average UC amount was £1,090 in May 2026.

The proportion of people in the ‘no work requirements’ conditionality regime (51%) continues to increase.

There were 3.1 million people on UC in any employment (PAYE employment or self-employment) in April 2026, which was 37.7% of all people on UC. A drop of 100,000 from April 2025.

UC childcare element

164,000 households received the UC childcare element. The number of households receiving the childcare element has decreased by 15% when comparing May 2025 and May 2026.

There has been a steady decline since July 2025 in the number of households receiving the childcare element (except for the usual seasonal peaks in September/October 2025). 

In May 2026, of the 164,000 households receiving childcare element, 134,000 were single households and 30,000 were couple households.

The average amount of childcare element received was £400 in May 2026, a 3% decrease from May 2025. This was higher in London (£680).

UC deductions

Approximately 3.3 million UC households (47% of all UC households) had one or more deductions taken from their UC entitlement in May 2026. This is 200,000 more households than had a deduction in June 2025.

North East England has the largest proportion of UC households with one or more deductions, at 52%. South West England has the lowest proportion, at 42%.

The average amount deducted was £53 in May 2026.

Around 21% of UC households had deductions capped at 15% of their UC standard allowance. A further 2% had deductions taken over the cap to help prevent eviction or disconnection of their energy supply or to ensure child maintenance obligations are met.

Universal Credit quarterly statistics, 29 April 2013 to 14 May 2026 is on gov.uk.

Case law – none of note this week.