DWP: Performance

Andrew Bridgen Excerpts

Monday 30th June 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Duncan Smith]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend, who is right about that, and I will come to that point in a minute. That is what happens in the development process. Universal credit is rolling out against the time scale I set last year, as I will demonstrate.

[Andrew Bridgen (North West Leicestershire) (Con)]

On behalf of my constituents, I want to thank the Secretary of State for all the excellent and essential work he is doing on welfare reform and for the part his Department is playing to deliver the Government’s long-term economic plan, which has seen unemployment in my constituency fall by 40% and youth unemployment fall by 50% over the past 12 months.

[Mr Duncan Smith]

What an excellent intervention. It is a testing one, but I will try to live up to it.

Let me move on to universal credit. Across all 44 programmes of change in the Department, we are taking a careful and controlled approach to achieve a safe and secure delivery. For example, the benefit cap started with an early roll-out and is now fully implemented, seeing 42,000 households capped and 6,000 move into work. Universal credit is on track to roll out safely and securely, against the plan I set out last year. The hon. Member for Leeds West quoted a figure of £12.8 billion but, as ever, shows a poor grasp of the finances. We have always been clear that universal credit’s total budget is £2 billion, and we will not overspend.

Furthermore, we have taken decisive action so as not to repeat the way in which programmes were rolled out under the previous Government. The reset will avoid the “big bang” concept that they put forward at the last election. They did a number of things that led them to have to write off huge sums of money. For example, their benefit processing replacement programme was not even introduced; it was just scrapped after £140 million had been wasted on IT that could never be used. Lectures about money that has to be written off with nothing to show for it should be directed at them, not us.

We have introduced the pathfinder in order to test and learn. We are now rolling it out, as I announced the other day, to 90 jobcentres across the north-west, and that process will be completed in the autumn. Furthermore, I have announced that, from today, new universal credit claims for couples will be rolling out into the live status, and claims for families will follow that roll-out. That will complete universal credit’s roll-out in the north-west, as we set out last year.

On the digital solution, nothing offers clearer proof that the existing live service works. It is delivering universal credit and will continue to do so. As I have always said, the majority of the existing IT will continue to be used, even as we develop the final element, which is the digital service, using all that equipment. It is about an end-state solution—fully online, fully secure and responsive to all digital threats—enhancing what we have already built. Universal credit will roll out on time, and it will deliver what we have said it will deliver—at least £38 billion in net benefit to the Exchequer.