In which I fail to write a brief history of Universal Credit

I set out to write a brief history of Universal Credit since 2010, but I realised when writing it that that is not possible, because it is in fact a brief history of government incompetence, falsehood and vindictiveness.

Universal Credit is a great idea that many people have tried to bring to fruit for more than fifty years. It simplifies the benefits system, removes lots of barriers about eligibility, removes barriers to getting back to work, and takes considerable administrative burden off citizens, businesses and the state. However, it always proved too complicated, particularly given the Byzantine complexity of the UK benefit system it was intended to replace. But fools rush in where angels fear to tread, so Iain Duncan Smith, on being given the DWP brief, could not wait to get his hands on it.

Universal Credit will not remove all complexity. Two issues in particular stand out. First, the costs of disability cannot be catered for by any universal credit system. We still need benefits to deal with the costs of living and working for disabled and chronically ill people.

Secondly, it will not deal with housing costs which vary far too much by claimant and by geography. This will be true anywhere, but is more true for the UK because of the febrile state of our housing market. So for both disability and housing costs there still needs to be a separate eligibility- and / or means-  tested system.

Still, if well implemented, it could remove a lot of administration and a lot of difficulty.

The important words there are "if well implemented". The current system is poorly designed but even so might be functional and might do some good, if it were well implemented. But the implementation has been catastrophically bad. Computer systems have been badly planned and commissioned; there has been tinkering with the principles and the practices on which UC operates which has necessitated throwing good money after bad. And they still do not work anywhere near as well as they should. It is telling that one of the DWP’s most stringent critics during this period has been The Register, a non-party-political online scientific and technical news site. E.g.  Department of Work and Pensions internal docs reveal troubled history of Universal Credit.

 The levels at which the benefit is set will not remove many people from the poverty trap. (There is a separate argument to be had about whether UC is affordable. In my view the current level has been set for doctrinaire rather than fiscal reasons.) Other rules, such as the waiting period before being eligible, the determination to pay monthly, and to make access online, are designed to make the system inaccessible (or, at the very least, were made without care for their effect on the claimant).

In addition to this, the current minister, Esther McVey, has continued two of Iain Duncan Smith's most poisonous practices. The first is the Pinocchio style of management whereby any cause for criticism is routinely denied, until it becomes undeniable. The routine is then usually to say, “That was last year’s / quarter’s / month’s / week’s figures. This  year’s / quarter’s / month’s / week’s figures are much better” without actually citing the current figures. Information is routinely concealed. FOI requests are tenaciously and expensively fought – note the two year attempt to keep hidden the documents referred to in the link above from The Register. And information is routinely destroyed. For instance, food bank use has increased markedly in areas where UC has been implemented. A Freedom of Information request unearthed the fact that “jobcentres are told to destroy evidence of foodbank referrals and stipulate; “it is not to be used for any other purpose, including to count/monitor the number of signposting slips issued””.

Meanwhile, the Trussell Trust, a studiously non-partisan provider, has released figures which embarrass the DWP: “Food bank use in UK reaches highest rate on record as benefits fail to cover basic costs”. On average at the time of this report food bank use had increased 13% over a year. In Universal Credit areas the rise was 52%.

And secondly, she has continued his determination to turn the entire DWP, including the UC section, and the various entities to which it outsources its work, into a vindictive machine in which claimants are misinformed, disbelieved, condescended to, lied about and outright bullied, some to their deaths. Many sources can be adduced for that statement. An article in the Guardian provides a flavour. Despite the title, it is not just about IT - “Universal credit IT system 'broken', whistleblowers say”.

So, in summary, it is not possible to outline a history of this manifestation of Universal Credit. Future students of social policy will be unable to tell whether UC as such was workable, because:

- whatever its merits, it is a fiendishly complicated idea whose complexities were ironed out with a sledgehammer. (An idea like this needs years of preparation, instead of which it got months.)
- every complexity that was ironed out was to the detriment of claimants. The welfare of the claimant is a by-product in this system.
- the IT systems on which it depends have never worked properly and there appears to be no hope that they will. (Systems like this need years of preparation, instead of which…..)
- there is a determination at the upper levels of the DWP not to learn but to implement UC with a steam roller, with no care for the effect on claimants.
- lying about its (lack of) progress has been and remains the strategy of choice for ministers.
- UC staff, like every arm of the DWP since 2010, are encouraged, cajoled, and outright threatened themselves to treat claimants as responsible for their own predicament.

The National Audit Office assessment “Rolling out Universal Credit” is excoriating for ministers. But, cravenly, the NAO concludes that it cannot see a viable alternative to continuing to throw good  money after bad, and continuing to throw good people onto an ever increasing scrap heap. That is an abdication of responsibility in the face of government incompetence and intransigence. There is a alternative, to scrap it and start again properly. The damage that would be done to Britain’s finances and reputation is infinitesimal compared to the damage that is being done to the lives and livelihoods of those unfortunate enough to have to claim it.

Don't believe it till you see it

The DWP's decision to cease re-testing chronically ill claimants is, a rare thing for the DWP in its current guise, welcome. It could be interpreted as part of Theresa May's ambition to govern for “everyone”, but it would be unwise to be too optimistic about further possible decisions and strategies. Firstly, we do not know yet who this will apply to. The criteria are yet to be drawn up, and they could easily turn out to be quite restrictive. Secondly, it is effectively a cost free exercise. The repeated assessments, with attendant reconsiderations and appeals, cost the department money, and save very little apart from those who are thrown off the benefit system because of the stress of repeated testing and because of wrong conclusions being drawn about people's fitness. Damien Green does not share Iain Duncan Smith's vindictive attitude towards claimants. Indeed hardly any Tories do, apart from Chris Grayling. Without that vindictive attitude it would be plain to any reasonable manager that the system should be stopped. Saving the government money by axing a pointless system cannot be interpreted as being one nation government. It means nothing politically. We also have to consider that other planned cuts will be going ahead, and these are a much more potent test of whether the Tories will be governing on behalf of everybody.

Iain Duncan Smith - when politics goes bad

Iain Duncan Smith, a man who I used to believe had a shred of decency somewhere about him, has turned out to be a lethal combination of incompetence and vindictiveness. We only need to concentrate on the latest revelations about the continuous car crash of his career. Like a drunk driver, IDS swerves from lamppost to lamppost, wreaking havoc on other people's lives but never his own.

The latest revelations just add more to what we already know. He piles misery on other people.

He apparently needed an armed bodyguard to get him to the Work and Pensions select committee meeting, and a bodyguard in the room with him - was it to throw himself in front of any question that might force IDS to tell the truth?

He denies that anything is going wrong with Universal Credit despite massive write offs of public money for bungled software implementations and deep slippage of the numbers being processed.

The Work Capability Assessment is still causing deep problems and continuing misery to thousands of ordinary, decent, respectable claimants, and even deeper misery for people with mental illness, who - three years after Professor Harrington started making recommendations for improvement, are still very badly served by the system.  Duncan Smith and then junior minister Chris Grayling have consistently claimed that Harrington supported the principle and the roll out, which Harrington now forcefully denies.

His latest wheeze is to go after part time workers. 1.5 million want to work more but there is no work for them to do. IDS plans to blame them for the lack of work and cut what benefits they are getting if they are not deemed to be looking for more work hard enough.

He already blames the unemployed for their unemployment. They are sent on courses where they have to be enthusiastic, change their mood, make themselves believe that they can be employed. (You don't believe me? Read this - written by proper psychologists without an axe to grind.)

The Work Programme and its offshoots are bad enough, but we also hear about duplicity in its management.

He is quite happy to have an arbitrary and vicious regime of sanctions rendering claimants destitute for the slightest misdemeanour, or even perceived misdemeanour. Or, it appears possibly, carefully engineered misdemeanour.

He laughs through a Commons debate about food banks, and the destitution in people's lives that force them to go there, until he leaves the debate well before its end, then refuses to meet the Trussell Trust, and dismisses their concerns as scaremongering.

Why is somebody so incompetent, but above all so vindictive still in office? This is where politics goes bad, because the answer lies in the workings of the political machine. IDS is not all that unpopular in the country at large, primarily because many, many people have swallowed the rhetoric about benefit scroungers. But he is unpopular enough. He is incompetent enough to spoil the Tory brand of being the competent party, and, although he's not the only one, that should lower his stock. It's not just obvious mistakes, like misusing statistics in such a way that he was bound to get criticised, it's the policy mistakes, like the bedroom tax that is set fair to cost far more than it saves.

But a certain number of Tory MPs agree with him whole heartedly, viz the number jeering and laughing through that debate on food banks. And other Tories cover up for him too.    How long will they continue to do so?

The problem is that, in Tory party terms, he is fireproof. He remains popular among enough MPs to give Cameron a real problem if he were to remove him. He can't shunt him sideways because IDS has apparently made it clear that he would resign rather than do any other job. (He really, really likes bullying people. If only it were just bullying people rather than rendering them homeless, hopeless, or even dead.) Not only that but there is the character and the temper of IDS himself. Cameron would rather keep him in office than have him on the back benches spreading his poison among the Tory right wing, and quite probably plotting to oust Cameron in an attempt to redeem his own failures. For that everybody else pays the price, particularly the millions of benefit claimants who suffer IDS's own personal brand of poison. Cameron obviously thinks that is a price worth paying.

At some point the political calculus may change, and if it does (I pray it does soon) the crash is likely to be hard and loud. But until then we continue to suffer the consequences of politics gone bad. The internal workings of the Tory party continue to foist on the rest of us the most poisonous minister I have ever seen in office (and I'm aware there is much competition for that epithet).

IDS's crocodile tears

I am following up yesterday's post about International Day for Disabled People – all over the world except in the UK. Yesterday was a day that every Liberal Democrat in the country should take notice of, because the government – in this case Iain Duncan Smith and the Department for Work and Pensions – is doing dreadful things in our name and with our support.

For all the rhetoric Iain Duncan Smith and his department have one objective, which is to reduce the benefits bill. They have no care for how they do so, or for the dreadful impact that has on the lives of the people they deprive of income. In the last few weeks he has made great play of the number of people he has got off benefits, despite the government's actual figures demonstrating really poor performance. But even where the Work Programme has got people into work, it has not reduced the benefit bill one penny. With two and a half million people chasing a few hundred thousand vacancies, not one new job has been created. Under normal circumstances, when a vacancy arises, an unemployed person applies for it, and gets it. When A4E get involved, they pick which unemployed person goes into the vacancy, leaving another unemployed person unemployed and claiming benefits. To do this they get paid, so the Work Programme creates no jobs but works as a mechanism for transferring money out of the pockets of taxpayers and into the hands of very profitable private companies. The work A4E is now charging us through the nose for was being done very capably by charities and NGOs before Iain Duncan Smith decided the private sector needed a boost.

In fact far from creating jobs, the Work Programme destroys jobs. Companies like Poundland now know that they can fill 10%, 15%, 20% of their labour needs through the Work Programme. So they no longer need to advertise those posts and pay people to fill them. So the taxpayer gets shafted twice. We are directly contributing to the profits of companies like Poundland by paying the wages for them, while also paying A4E for choosing which unemployed person will go there. There is more detail here.

Meanwhile Lord Freud thinks that poor people should take more risks. It is tempting to speculate about which planet he was on when he said that, certainly not this one. I would like to think that the rich might be inclined to take more risks, but there is no sign of them doing so. The Director General of the BBC is just the latest case in a long line where people are given contracts that fireproof them against failure of any kind. The DG's contract was such that the BBC were required to give him a year's pay if they sacked him. Why? If he is not capable of putting something away for a rainy day on a salary of £450,000, what on earth is he doing in a job of such responsibility? The same goes for every single bonus and every single feather bed contract given to directors and CEOs since the crash of 2008. No high level contract should ever carry more than the legal minimum benefits: they are well enough rewarded by the rate of pay. The bankers and the directors have gone on doing business as before, except for the occasional shareholder revolt, and the government has done nothing to ensure that when people play with other people's money, they take responsibility for what they do. If they did that, they would make better decisions, and companies would be more profitable. Subject to the government's laissez faire attitude towards taxing multi nationals, the tax take would be higher, and the government would lose their excuse to screw poor people even harder. Which is of course why they're not doing it.

So all in all, government policy towards the rich and the poor is not just not helping with the recession, it is actually making it worse. We've known for a long time that the Conservative part of the government has no intention of actually making rich people take the consequences of their actions. It becomes clearer every day that their intention is actually to make the poor pay for the actions of the rich, by hounding and harassing them off benefits.

These are not isolated cases - every day up and down the country, disabled and sick people are being told they are fit for work, and being made to - pardon the pun - jump through hoops to re-establish their need for benefit. Try this one for size: "A blind, deaf, tube-fed, non verbal, disabled man from Scotland has been deemed fit for work" - this is not an aberration, it is normal procedure for ATOS, aided and abetted by Iain Duncan Smith's DWP.

Brian McArdle died when his disability benefits were stopped. His son wrote to Iain Duncan Smith, and got back a clunkingly self justificatory letter written without a hint of compassion.

Karen Sherlock died in the middle of an entirely unnecessary battle with the DWP over the income she needed.

I say again, these are not aberrations. Between January and July last year 1,100 claimants died after they were put in the “work-related activity group”. Yesterday, on the International Day for Persons with Disabilities, by an exquisite irony, the DWP brought into effect a provision that people on ESA, and in the WRAG - deemed by the DWP's own system to be unfit for work - can be mandated to go for work, without any time limit.  Jobseeker's Allowance claimants who are mandated to go to Work Programme placements have a time limit of three months on those placements. But if they have decided you are unfit for work, you can be made to work to the end of your days, or lose benefit. There is certainly no compassion, but neither is there any logic or any competence in these provisions. In fact quite the opposite - these measures hinder economic recovery for one purpose only - to hound the poor and the sick, with all the perverted moral zeal that Iain Duncan Smith can bring to the task.

Yesterday I wrote as a human being. Today I write as a Liberal Democrat. Liberal Democrats must withdraw all and any support for Iain Duncan Smith's poisonous schemes, and work to put some compassion and rationality back into the benefit system.

The UK government and International Day of Persons with Disabilities

Today is International Day of Persons with Disabilities – all over the world except in the UK. In the UK Iain Duncan Smith is marking the day by continuing and intensifying his campaign against unemployed people in general and disabled people in particular.

Every disabled claimant now has to undergo a Work Capability Assessment (started by Labour – who have yet to apologise for it). The WCA is in fact a BDS – a Benefit Denial System. Its purpose is to get people off benefits by any means possible. The claimant's own description of their condition is not credited, medical evidence is not accepted. If a claimant gets to the assessment room, that proves they can walk. If they sit in the chair throughout the process, that proves they can sit at a desk. Then they are deemed capable of work. Iain Duncan Smith's department is doing this quite deliberately, to reduce the benefit bill, regardless of the cost to disabled people. Terminally ill people are being found fit for work. People with the most horrible conditions are being found fit for work. Yes, some terminally ill people work till the day they die. But only a small proportion of them. At the moment, the DWP's own figures show that 70 people a week are dying within a short time of having their WCA. You read that right. 70 a week – 3500 a year.

“Work” now means you can lift a pencil. It does not mean that you are employable. That is Iain Duncan Smith's great trick, completely divorcing the idea of “work” from the idea of being profitably employable for a company. If you have not worked in this sphere it is difficult to imagine, but please bear with me. Think back to the worst flu you have ever had. If you've never had flu, think back to the worst hangover. At some point you hauled yourself out of bed, tottered downstairs and made yourself a Lemsip. According to IDS that means you were capable of walking, and of operating machinery. You were fit for work. But you didn't go in to work, did you? Now imagine feeling like that all the time – every day, 24 hours a day, no let up, ever. Sorry, but you're fit for work.

Scene 1

Applicant: “I've come for the job.”

Employer: “Sure, we have vacancies.”

Applicant: “I'm terminally ill with cancer, by the way.”

Employer: “What?”

Applicant: “It's OK, I'm fit for work, The DWP says so.”

Employer: “Er...”

Applicant: “I need to take ten minutes out every couple of hours to vomit, but I'll make up the time.”

Employer: “Um....”

Applicant: “And I'll be dead in about three months, but it's being off benefit that's important. I'd much rather be here stacking shelves and coughing all over the customers than spending my last few weeks with my family.”

Scene 2

Applicant: “I'd like a job.”

Employer: “Sure, we have vacancies..... What's that smell?”

Applicant: “Oh, sorry. I just shat myself again. I'll clean up, then I'll be ready. It's OK, I'm fit for work, the DWP says so”.

Scene 3

Employer: “We start at 9”.

Applicant: “I should be able to get in for that some days.”

Employer: “We start at 9. That's when the phones start ringing”.

Applicant: “I have ME. I never know from one day to the next when I'll be able to get myself out of bed. I can manage 11 most days. It's OK, the DWP says I'm fit for work, so can I have the job please”.

It's all happening because the benefit bill is unaffordable, right? We can afford to spend billions and billions and billions fattening bank balance sheets. We can afford to spend billions on the Olympics. We can afford to see billions and billions disappear in unpaid corporate taxes. We can afford to see companies still run inefficiently, and billions in bonuses paid to people who cannot demonstrate that they have earned them. We can even afford £5 million a year to subsidise the alcohol in the House of Commons bar where Iain Duncan Smith toasts himself with a glass at the taxpayers' expense on disappearing yet more people from the benefit rolls. But we can't afford to treat our disabled people with a minimum amount of decency.