In April last year, The MJ ran a story which said ‘English councils have been urged to sign up to one of 12 local authority-led pilot projects in preparation for the introduction of Universal Credit (UC) from October 2013'.

Since then, the Government has decided to scale back these plans. Now, testing will begin in Ashton-under-Lyne this month, with three more in Wigan, Warrington and Oldham starting to hand out UC in July. This means there will only be a third of the testing done that was originally planned.