Universal Credit

Baroness Hollis of Heigham Excerpts

Wednesday 9th July 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Freud]

One thing I want to ensure is that I can get as much information to noble Lords as I possibly can. I am pleased to say that I have extended an invitation, which has been accepted, to arrange for a group of opposition Peers—as many as the noble Baroness would like to bring; well, not quite as many as that; we could not fit them all into Hammersmith; but enough to fill the room with a little standing room—to go through what is happening on the ground and the process.

One thing that I am keen to show the noble Baroness, which we saw this morning with a small group, is access to the work coaches to see how they work with clients in an entirely different way—in particular, to try to help the most vulnerable, whether it is looking at how they budget or various other things that they will need to do under universal credit.

[Baroness Hollis of Heigham (Lab)]

My Lords, Mr Duncan Smith insists that UC is on time, on track and on budget. I fear that it is not. None of the monitoring bodies—the Treasury, the Major Projects Authority, the NAO, the DWP Select Committee, the Public Accounts Committee, Sir Bob Kerslake—believes that. To paraphrase Sir Jeremy Heywood, the project remains well off-track. We want this to work. Will the Minister, whose integrity we entirely respect, give us the facts and the future plans rather than recycle the empty bluster of the Secretary of State?

[Lord Freud]

My Lords, this is a very large programme and the way we are doing it is quite responsive. What we have is a test and learn process. That is not just an empty phrase. It is a very large process, based on a live run-out of many tens of thousands of people, which feeds into how we build a fully digital interactive service that we are building at the same time. We will make changes to the process. That is what it is about. It would be silly to do all that work without being responsive. We learn lots of things. One of my jobs is to try to understand what we are finding out and then make those changes. There will be changes. Having said that, we announced a rollout process in December and we are, to my pleasure, managing to get it out to time with those plans. The next stages, which are towards the end of the year, are really important—moving on to families, bringing in childcare and going to that digital place. By the end of the year we will have a working test bed of how a fully interactive process will work. I am not saying it will not change after that, but I am saying that we are doing what we were planning to do.