Too much, too fast: the government's 'welfare revolution' starts to unwind
Poor results for universal credit, work programme and youth contract
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- The Guardian, Thursday 25 July 2013 16.01 EDT
Liam
Byrne the shadow work and pensions secretary said: 'The welfare
revolution we were promised has fallen apart.' Photograph: Lewis
Whyld/PA Wire/Press Association Images
Buried beneath the
news of Prince George's arrival on Monday was an announcement from the
Department for Work and Pensions that staff working for the private IT
firm Atos, delivering the controversial fitness-for-work assessments,
were all to be retrained,
owing to "unacceptably poor" standards of work.
Similarly, long awaited statistics showed Nick Clegg's £1bn
youth contract scheme had helped little more than 2,000 people
find long-term work. The numbers covered the first year of what was
planned to be a three year scheme. It was dismissed by the shadow work
and pensions secretary Liam Byrne as a scheme with a 95% failure rate.
These were bleak indications that all was not well within two of the government's previously much trumpeted
welfare
reform programmes – drowned amid royal baby hysteria. It was a
significant moment for a department that is rapidly getting used to
making uncomfortable admissions.
Over the past few months, the DWP
has had to make disappointing announcements in at least four
significant policy areas: as well as the work capability assessment
announcement and the youth contract figures, the department has
indicated that the timetable for implementation of its main
benefits
reform, universal credit, is slipping back, and has released results
from the much-hyped work programme that are best described as mixed.
The
DWP has been successful in making the political argument for welfare
changes, and polls continue to show support for cuts to benefits across
all parties. A poll by
Lord Ashcroft suggested that 86% of Unite members support the government's £26,000 benefit cap – but it has repeatedly stumbled on the implementation side.
Whitehall
analysts wonder if the department has bitten off more than it can chew
by announcing and attempting to implement a range of ambitious new
policies, affecting vast numbers of people, in one term.
Officials
have come under huge strain as they struggle to push forward with
reform, at a time when the departmental headcount has been cut
radically. The
Institute for Fiscal Studies calculated recently
that between 2011 and 2016 the department will have lost 40% of its
workforce. The Public and Commercial Services union said the DWP had cut
20,000 jobs since May 2010.
Labour has been struggling to marry
its fervent belief that social security is a cornerstone of social
democracy with a public increasingly intolerant of "benefit culture".
Its spokesmen attack specific reforms, but cannot say if they will be
repealed.
Labour's own tough proposals for welfare, such as the
requirement to work after two years on the dole, are either not known or
little understood. Its best hope may lie in the claim Tory welfare is
not working. Incompetence rather than ideology becomes the battleground.
Shadow
work and pensions secretary Liam Byrne is moving in that direction. He
said: "The welfare revolution we were promised has fallen apart. The
work programme doesn't work, universal credit is disappearing into the
sunset, and now we know that the youth contract has been a disaster and
Atos is spinning out of control. Iain Duncan Smith has presided over the
worst delivery failure seen in any government department for years."
Several
policy analysts agree that part of the problem lies with the
department's determination to introduce several major reforms
simultaneously, focusing on getting them running, and less on how well
they work once they have been launched.
Tom Gash, research director at the Institute for Government, which last week
published
a report questioning the government's skills at outsourcing and
commissioning private companies to take on complex and risky government
contracts, said: "The government's capacity to manage these programmes
is not yet up there with their ambition."
Dave Simmonds, chief
executive for the employment thinktank Inclusion, said: "Politicians are
running too hard, pushing diminishing numbers of civil servants."
Anne
Begg, Labour MP and chair of the work and pensions select committee,
which scrutinises the work of the DWP, said: "Any one of these major
reforms would be a big reform for a department to undertake in a
parliamentary cycle and they have five on at once, including pension
reform. The volumes of people affected are huge. It would be a miracle
if everything worked instantly.Citizens Advice says the scale of reform
has made this a difficult period for claimants. "Delivering complex
reforms can lead to big problems, as shown by the fact that last year
Citizens Advice Bureaus dealt with almost half a million problems with
employment and support allowance, 54% higher than the previous year,"
the charity's chief executive, Gillian Guy, said, referring to the new
incapacity benefit, granted to those who pass Atos-administered fitness
for work tests. "Nine out of ten of our clients that we spoke to in a
recent study said they are not ready for universal credit."
The
DWP said: "There is no doubt that this department is pursuing and
delivering an aggressive reform agenda. We've already successfully
launched the benefit cap, universal credit and the new personal
independence payment, and the work programme has got over 320,000 of the
hardest to help into jobs. We're bringing in our reforms safely and
responsibly, and our ability to deliver these changes cannot be
questioned following our well proven track record for delivery."
The
key areas of difficulty for the department are currently the work
programme, universal credit, the youth contract and the employment and
support allowance tests.
Universal credit
Something
has gone wrong with universal credit, the centrepiece of the welfare
revolution. It may well be rectifiable and in October 2017 everyone on
benefit in and out of work will be on universal credit, as Duncan Smith
had always planned and insists will still happen.
But with the
changes to the speed with which universal credit will be introduced, and
to the kind of caseload that will be put into the system, it is
difficult to be confident.
Aware of the potential political
damage, ministers are often unclear in public about the source of delay,
repeatedly offering reassurance, insisting they had always planned to
road-test ideas, and denying they were ever wedded to an artificial
timetable set out in 2011.
The potential for disaster is evident.
Universal credit merges six different benefits together and the claimant
receives a single monthly household payment. It requires different
payments to landlords, more online claims, and merges in- and
out-of-work benefits, requiring a new benefit condition regime for those
in work. It also requires close co-operation between the DWP systems
and tax officials at HMRC.
The first steps have been baby steps.
Universal credit went live on 29 April with just one jobcentre – Ashton
under Lyne – accepting clams for universal credit and three other
jobcentres, Wigan, Warrington and Oldham, testing the system before
taking claims for universal credit in July. It had been intended that
all four jobcentres would go live in April.
The aim was to start
with the most simple caseload, such as a single unemployed claimant, to
see how universal credit changes the claimant's behaviour and how the IT
systems work.
It had been intended that from October that all new
claimants receiving out of work benefits would move to universal
credit, but earlier this month Duncan Smith told the work and pensions
select committee that the credit would be introduced for new claimants
in just six additional "hub jobcentres" – Hammersmith, Rugby, Inverness,
Harrogate, Bath and Shotton, alongside the existing four "pathfinders".
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