The verdict: Universal Credit is a Governmental Disgrace

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Can the DWP do anything right? Universal Credit joins the Work Programme and the murderous administration of Employment and Support Allowance on the list of Iain Duncan Smith’s failures.

The National Audit Office has published its ‘early progress’ report on Iain Duncan Smith’s flagship Universal Credit scheme – and it is damning.

The report states that, after years of development in which £425 million was spent on the scheme, the Department for Work and Pensions does not even have a detailed view of how Universal Credit is supposed to work.

I should just stop there and spend the rest of this article discussing that one piece of information. After months and years of listening to ‘RTU’ ranting about how Universal Credit was going to be a revolution in benefit claims, we now know that he does not know – and never bothered to work out – how his revolution was going to be delivered!

Nor does Howard Shiplee, the ‘director general’ who has been talking it up on the media over the last few days.

Universal Credit is an attempt to “simplify” six major areas of social security into one streamlined payment system. They are: Income Support, income-based Jobseekers Allowance, income-based Employment and Support Allowance, tax credits (child and working), housing benefit and budgeting loans.

However: “Poor control and decision-making undermined confidence in the programme and contributed to a lack of progress,” the report states. This is directly attributable to the Secretary of State – it is his failure.

The report – and we should remember that this is from an organisation concerned with whether the government is spending our money wisely – concluded that the DWP has not achieved value for money.

The department was over-ambitious in both the timetable and scope of the programme, the report states. This is interesting in itself. How can its scope be “ambitious” if nobody even knew how it was supposed to work?

According to the NAO: “The Department took risks to try to meet the short timescale and used a new project management approach which it had never before used on a programme of this size and complexity. It was unable to explain how it originally decided on its ambitious plans or evaluated their feasibility.” In other words, from its employees right up to its ministers and Secretary of State, the DWP could not justify the risks it took with taxpayers’ money and never bothered to investigate the likelihood of failure.

“Given the tight timescale, unfamiliar project management approach and lack of a detailed plan, it was critical that the Department should have good progress information and effective controls. In practice the Department did not have any adequate measures of progress.”

The report singles out for particularly strong criticism the computer system intended to run the new benefit. “The Department is not yet able to assess the value of the systems it spent over £300 million to develop… Over 70 per cent of the £425 million spent to date has been on IT systems,” it states.

Then it says, “The Department, however, has already written off £34 million of its new IT systems and does not yet know if they will support national roll-out.” So the systems are not – to use a favourite DWP phrase – “fit for work”.

In fact, some parts don’t work on any level at all: “For instance, the current IT system lacks a component to identify potentially fraudulent claims so that the Department has to rely on multiple manual checks on claims and payments.” Meaning: In the single Job Centre where UC has been introduced, employees have been working out claims on paper.

“Such checks will not be feasible or adequate once the system is running nationally.” It seems amazing, but Iain Duncan Smith probably needed to see that, written down in black and white, or he might never have considered the possibility.

Problems with the IT system have delayed the national roll-out of the programme (and for that, considering all of the above, we should all breathe a long-drawn-out sigh of relief). “In early 2013, the Department was forced to stop work on its plans for national roll-out and reassess its options for the future… The Department will not introduce Universal Credit for all new claims nationally in October 2013 as planned, and is now reconsidering its plans for full roll-out.

“Instead, it will extend the pilots to six more sites with these new sites taking on only the simplest claims. Delays to the roll-out will reduce the expected benefits of reform and – if the Department maintains a 2017 completion date – increase risks by requiring the rapid migration of a large volume of claimants.”

The DWP intends to spend £2.4 billion on Universal Credit up to April 2023. To put that in perspective, that’s twice as much as the government loses on all benefit fraud – not just those being bundled together here – every year. And this will “increase risks”.

The spending watchdog found that the DWP took some action at the end of 2012 to resolve problems, but was unable to address the underlying issues effectively.

“The programme suffered from weak management, ineffective control and poor governance,” said Amyas Morse, head of the National Audit Office.

Despite all this, the report incredibly states that “the programme still has potential to create significant benefits for society, but the Department must scale back its delivery ambition and set out realistic plans”.

Liam Byrne will no doubt seize this as an opportunity, yet again, to offer Labour’s help to find a way forward and bring Universal Credit back on track. He should be discouraged from doing so. This ‘flagship’ hasn’t so much sailed as sunk.

Universal Credit is a FAILURE.

It should be SCRAPPED – before that idiot Smith wastes any more of our money on it.

How can we trust the police over April, after the Savile and Hillsborough cover-ups?

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Any Questions, April Jones, BBC, Director General, Dyfed Powys, Greg Dyke, Hillsborough, Jimmy Savile, Lord Falconer, Mike Sivier, mikesivier, police, Vox Political

I’m not convinced I trust the police any more – especially when they say they’ve got the right man in the April Jones case.

My reason may surprise you. It all has to do with Jimmy Savile, my own experiences of Dyfed Powys Police, and the Hillsborough Inquiry.

It seems the Savile case has turned up large numbers of people who said they complained that the veteran TV and radio presenter had abused them, but that they were turned away by the authorities. Nobody did anything.

By last Friday evening (October 12), there were 300 leads and 40 alleged victims. Lord Falconer said on the BBC’s Any Questions: “People were obviously complaining about his behaviour and if you complain that you are being abused by somebody in power, whether it be a parent and a child, an older person and a child, a person in authority and somebody who is a fan, and you are told, ‘Just forget it – it never happened’, that makes the thing so much worse.

“The evidence that that happened is pretty overwhelming now… A particular newspaper identified a gentleman who complained about it; he was told that nothing would be done about it. Complaints were made, and they were rejected.

“Once you complain and nothing is done about it, you so undermine trust in the institutions, and we know this from other events that have happened, for example, the attitude that the Roman Catholic Church took to persistent abuse.”

This is the experience of my girlfriend (I call her Mrs Mike in this blog). Her mother got into an unfortunate relationship with an extremely abusive man in the mid-1970s, when Mrs Mike was seven. My girlfriend had to endure 10 years of physical, psychological and sexual abuse (of the worst kind) before she was able to get away.

She was not, emotionally speaking, able to make a complaint to the police until four years after that and, from what’s been said above, you should already know what they told her: “There’s no evidence. We’re not going to do anything.”

They did say they would keep her information on file indefinitely, and if anybody else came forward, they would reopen the case. This has turned out to be a lie.

Mrs Mike’s mother remained in that abusive relationship for 28 devastating years. During that time, she made repeated attempts to get away, to report the abuses against her to the police, and to get criminal proceedings started against her abuser. On every single occasion she was told by police officers to go home, and that they were not going to do anything. Every time. They couldn’t say there wasn’t any evidence because these occasions were immediately after incidents of violence or abuse. But they weren’t interested.

Back to Any Questions, which also discussed Hillsborough. As Greg Dyke, a former BBC Director General, put it: “Hillsborough, as we now know, is a massive institutional cover-up… The police behaved… appallingly. They made a mistake which created the thing in the first place… But the cover-up is not acceptable under any circumstances. And then the briefing of the press to blame it on the victims of Hillsborough, and saying they were drunk, and saying they urinated over other people, and stole from them is beyond contempt.”

Philip Hammond, the Defence Secretary, said: “The challenge to confidence in public institutions, if there is evidence of systematic cover-up… is very, very damaging.”

Lord Falconer again: “96 people died in a disaster to which the police very substantially contributed. For 23 years the police told lies about what had happened and the families of the 96 who died felt utterly obliged to protect the reputations of those whom they loved, who had died. And this was despite the fact that the police continued in the cover-up, the judges who looked at it failed to spot the cover-up, the other police forces that looked at it failed to spot the cover-up and it took the Bishop of Liverpool and a panel of independent people, utterly separate from the traditional organs of the State who look at these things to uncover the truth.

“Those 23 years of pain and suffering should not lead to the situation where people say, ‘It’s too late’ and the families don’t get justice. A family member whose son died in the disaster said, ‘My other children were very young… they grew up during those 23 years and I never noticed them growing up; I don’t know what happened’. Another person, who is a mother, said that she was 42 when her loved ones died. She’s now 65 but she still feels like she’s 42; those 23 years have been lost – and the idea that they should not get justice after 23 years is an utter affront to our society.”

After Mrs Mike’s mother finally escaped, she contacted my girlfriend and they went to the police jointly. They believed that the evidence my girlfriend had provided previously, coupled with the evidence of her mother (who was finally able to talk about it, having got away from her abuser’s controlling influence) could lead to a conviction. And what did the police say?

“We’ve destroyed that file. It’s gone.”

My experience of police investigations into child sexual abuse (and the abuse of adults), is therefore exactly the same as that endured by the Jimmy Savile whistle-blowers – the police didn’t want to know. And, like the police involved in Hillsborough, they covered up the evidence, ensuring that the person responsible for ruining these people’s lives would never face the justice he richly deserves.

The physical and emotional effects of such abuses are so devastating I do not believe it is possible to describe them in a way that another person could understand. You would have to live through them – and I would not wish that on anybody.

What does this have to do with the April Jones case?

The service involved with Mrs Mike’s case – and that of her mother – is Dyfed Powys Police, the same force that has been investigating the kidnapping of April Jones.

Consider the situation with April. She was abducted. Police were informed. Did they work out how far away a kidnapper could have travelled in the time between the last sighting of April and the missing person’s report being made, arrange to block all road routes leading away from Machynlleth and search vehicles on their way out? No. And that’s just the obvious course of action. I wonder what else they didn’t do.

They instead concentrated on searching the land in and around Machynlleth. They arrested a man 18 hours after April went missing. She was not with him. We do not know what evidence was found which led to his arrest. We are led to believe that the suspect was known to police previously.

Under those circumstances, it is easy to question the investigators’ actions. Under pressure to come up with a perpetrator at short notice, did they pick up their list of known felons, find one who (we are told) knew the victim and her family, who had a record, and turn him into their scapegoat?

In the time period under discussion here, that poor little girl could have been spirited out of the UK, right under the noses of the authorities. I do not believe it is reasonable to accept that the police did everything in their power to find her, considering the information we have about what they did.

I will only be prepared to believe Dyfed Powys Police have the right man if, when the case comes to court, he can make a full and frank confession that he kidnapped and murdered April, without any duress having been put upon him by investigating officers.

Otherwise, considering the record of the Dyfed Powys force, I will fear yet another police cover-up.

Will the upcoming election of Police Commissioners lead to increased confidence in a service that is utterly discredited? I wonder…