Oral Answers to Questions

Anne Begg Excerpts

Monday 23rd January 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Duncan Smith]

I recognise that, and the point is that although the vast majority of those who receive local housing allowance make their payments on time, there is always a group that does not. The way to deal with that is to recognise that we need to help landlords by not allowing those kinds of people to get away with it—for example, by paying a little bit at the two-month point, which sets the clock back to zero. We can make adjustments that way, and we can also deal with those who have difficultly by assisting them and, where necessary, making direct payments. However, those payments should always be the exception, to try to help people manage their budgets.

[Dame Anne Begg (Aberdeen South) (Lab)]

10. What estimate he has made of the average cost to a small business of real-time reporting of PAYE information to enable calculation of universal credit entitlement.

[The Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (Mr Iain Duncan Smith)]

Real-time information—there was a question about this earlier—should not be an additional cost to business, and I do not believe it will be. Ultimately, it will help to reduce administration burdens for employers. RTI will also be good for Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, because it will help to eradicate some of the errors caused by HMRC waiting a year before adjusting what it has already paid and then trying to chase people for that money. The fraud and error savings that will arise from the RTI programme—which the DWP considers vital for the universal credit—should be around £700 million, which is an important feature.

[Dame Anne Begg]

I do not think that the businesses I speak to have any idea whatever that this is about to hit them ahead of the introduction of auto-enrolment, which they are more conscious of and worried about. However, that may be academic, because from what I am hearing, HMRC’s timetable for real-time information has slipped. It will not be ready to roll out RTI universally across the country on the date that the universal credit is introduced. What happens to universal credit if RTI is not in place on its launch date?

[Mr Duncan Smith]

From the word go, we have not needed the full system of real-time information to be ready for universal credit. We get our information from essentially two feeds, which we have already been working on with HMRC, long before any further timetables. The reality is that RTI will dovetail nicely with universal credit, but we do not need it for that, and we are not expecting it to be ready at the start of universal credit. We were never expecting that, and we have been working on that basis. However, RTI will come in—it is “on timetable”—and those involved will be working hard to produce it.