Programme beset by delays and failures told by internal
review it must “industrialise” to realise efficiency savings,
while evidence on employment benefits has yet to be
produced
On December 5 last year the House of Commons decided
that Government should provide the Committee with a series of its
Project Assessment Reviews (PARs) of Universal Credit,
carried out by the Infrastructure and Projects Authority (IPA).
The Committee is today, Thursday 8 February 2018,
publishing its assessment of the Reviews, ahead of the
report’s presentation in the House by Committee Chair Rt
Hon MP this afternoon.
Chair of the Committee Rt Hon MP said: “Perhaps the most
damning point that emerges from any assessment of the
Government’s progress on Universal Credit is that in the eighth
year of the programme, the Department itself has yet to produce
the full business case for its own mega reform. The programme
managers appear to expect us, the public, and the Minister
responsible to take it on faith that UC will deliver the much
improved employment outcomes they claim for the vast range of
people – disabled, single parents, carers, the self-employed -
who will claim UC. At the moment they are relying on the simplest
cases – single, unemployed claimants with no children. They have
produced no evidence to back up the key, central economic
assumption of the biggest reform to our welfare system in 50
years. William Beveridge will be rolling in his grave.
“The Reviews, which barely mention claimants, are also shot
through with management gobbledegook. Were I the Minister in
charge, I would have either rejected or ignored much of it
entirely as totally incomprehensible. They were of course not
designed for public consumption, but this major reform would
surely have been served better by a much more transparent
approach.”
The Committee describes a “chaotic start” to the UC programme,
which took the UC programme to “the brink of complete
failure” in 2013. It is to the Department's credit that it
has brought it back from that brink, but the programme still
faces major challenges.
The Committee’s report states that while the IPA’s call for
the “industrialisation” of UC for complex cases and vulnerable
customers is an unfortunate choice of phrase, UC can only deliver
its promised efficiency gains if it becomes cheaper and less
labour-intensive. In January of this year the Office for
Budget Responsibility warned of the “significant risk” the UC
programme poses to control of public finances. The
Department has consistently struggled to convince the IPA that UC
can be scaled up as planned. The Department must balance the
considerable costs of further delays against the costs of
pressing ahead.
Chronic delays and revisions to the rollout are a recurrent theme
through the reports, persisting up to the present day: following
the November 2017 Budget, the digital service will be rolled out
to ten Jobcentres per month between February and April 2018,
compared to over 60 per month on the previous plan, that plan
itself one of serial significant revisions to earlier
projections.
The Committee also sets out concerns about the review process.
The PARs are consistently critical of the Department's failure to
set clear criteria for proceeding to the next stage of the UC
rollout. The Committee argues that setting clear
performance standards in advance is the best way of ensuring
decisions are made objectively. The scope of the reviews,
agreed with the DWP programme team, changed between assessments,
meaning that important findings were not followed up in detail.
The latest review, which assessed the readiness of UC for an
accelerated rollout from October 2017, was explicitly excluded
from considering whether previous IPA recommendations had been
acted on, whether UC would achieve its business case, and
whether it was delivering its policy intent. The Committee
found it “very surprising” that UC had not been subject to a full
PAR since October 2015. /ENDS
Full inquiry details: Universal Credit
rollout
