Trade-offs in Bureaucratic Justice in Universal Credit

In our earlier research, we examined the factors that shape people’s evaluations of bureaucratic justice in the Universal Credit (UC) service. The five factors in the model are: usability; individualised treatment; dignity; efficiency; and neutrality. However, the way these process qualities apply when considering how to configure a process gives rise to some tensions; the inevitability of trade-offs when striving to design just administrative processes is a well-established idea within the literature. In the third phase of our study of the processes in the UC service, we took two trade-off tensions that officials in the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) often face and, through a survey of 2,093 former or current Universal Credit claimants, sought to understand how UC claimants would resolve these trade-offs. Our intention was to capture quantitative data on questions that would usually be left to official judgment or tested through small-scale user research, thereby bringing a new perspective to this issue. The trade-offs we examined were between (a) consistency and discretion, and (b) speed and accuracy of decision. These results demonstrated that amongst UC claimants, there is a clear-cut preference for discretion over consistency and a slightly less clear-cut preference for accuracy over speed. These findings, we suggest, have two main implications. First, they demonstrate the value of capturing the claimant’s perspective on trade-offs within UC service design. Second, when claimants' perspectives are captured on this issue, they can pose questions about how the UC service is designed; while the DWP takes a ‘user-focused’ approach to design, its overall approach to trade-offs might be out of step with prevailing claimant sentiment on key issues.