‘We’ll have to take benefits of Universal Credit on good faith’

THE Government has failed to make a full business case for the roll-out of Universal Credit (UC), MPs have said.

People are being expected to take it on good faith that the controversial welfare shake-up will deliver, according to the chairman of the Commons Work and Pensions Committee Frank Field.

And the roll out of UC, beset by delays, still has some of its toughest challenges to deal with, a report by the committee states.

After examining internal project assessment reviews of the UC programmes’s finance and delivery by the Infrastructure and Projects Authority (IPA), the committee expressed concerns about the situation.

The IPA called for the “industrialisation” of the UC programme for “complex cases and vulnerable customers” in order to realise efficiency savings, while “evidence on employment benefits has yet to be produced”, MPs said.

The report warned that some of the biggest challenges facing UC, such as delivering an automated online service on a national scale, lie ahead.

Mr Field 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.”