Universal Credit

Debate between Baroness Buscombe and Baroness Andrews

Monday 5th November 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Buscombe]

My Lords, I am sorry, it should be the debt repayment rate. I am grateful to the noble Lord. I am so eager to get this right, and noble Lords may understand that there are quite a lot of numbers and it is quite technical. I am quite emotional about the fact that we are the party of social mobility and we have introduced a system that we genuinely believe will be better for everyone. It is, however, a very hard system to get right for everyone, because everyone is different—we are dealing with different situations and circumstances and we do not want people to fall through the cracks.

[Baroness Andrews (Lab)]

I appreciate what the noble Baroness has just said, because it is an extraordinarily complex system, and this is the biggest—and riskiest—change in social security for decades. She has said that people’s lives are different. When she refers to working conditions and benefits, surely she should remember what we have been saying about the need to take great care—universal credit is great in principle but very difficult to get right. A redesign should not be beyond the Government’s confidence.

I will repeat one question that was raised by both my noble friend on our Front Bench and by the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood. If the Government want, as they must, to simplify whatever they can, surely they should have a better answer than the one they have given about why they do not segment certain categories of people that cannot be treated universally. It would be relatively simple to do. Apparently the department has said that it cannot be done. That is not a good enough reason when the noble Baroness is struggling to explain what will happen. There is a risk of mistakes that will bear down on the very poorest with disastrous results. This is not scaremongering, and I resent it being described so: these are very serious challenges for the very poorest in our society.

[Baroness Buscombe]

I agree with some of what the noble Baroness said but not that I am struggling—I am just saying as much as possible in the time allowed. There is a lot to say—a lot that is positive. I repeat, however, that she is correct in saying that it is hard and that we have to get it right. That is why we are going to spend so much time on the design, which is not there yet—we have not yet designed the managed migration process. That is the point: we will have rolled out universal credit itself in all the jobcentres—634 of them, I think—by the end of this year, but we will take the actual managed migration process much more slowly, because it will lift people already on benefits from legacy benefits on to universal credit.

I wish that we could automatically transfer certain categories of people seamlessly, but we did that in 2011 when we were moving people from incapacity benefit to ESA, and the problem was that we missed some people’s change of circumstances and underpaid them. We do not want to take that risk again—we would be facing another judicial review. We know, however, that about 700,000 people are not receiving the legacy benefits—worth about £2.4 billion—that they are entitled to, and we want them to. That is one of the main reasons why we want face-to-face contact—work coaches and claimants working together to make sure that they get the right support.