Fiona Mactaggart
Main Page: Fiona Mactaggart (Labour - Slough)Department Debates - View all Fiona Mactaggart's debates with the Department for Work and Pensions
(11 years ago)
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Mr Duncan Smith
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Universal credit is worth doing properly because of the benefits it brings to so many people. Just in case he does not remember, although the Opposition say that they support it, they voted against it. We will take no lessons from them because of the chaos, mess and cost that they left for us in the welfare system. We are having to pick up the details of that and put them right. We are doing that every day.
Fiona Mactaggart (Slough) (Lab)
The Secretary of State says that he has read and implemented the report of the Public Accounts Committee, which confirmed that the Department
“only reported good news and denied the problems”.
Unfortunately, we have seen no change today. A specific recommendation of the report was that the Government should urgently carry out an impairment review into the value of the IT assets that had been written down as a result of ineffectualness. As he has confirmed today that the recommendations have all been implemented, will he tell us what that value was according to his own impairment review?
Mr Duncan Smith
The Department has carried out probably the most exhaustive impairment review. It is now being signed off by the National Audit Office. I gave the figures to the Work and Pensions Committee yesterday. The total write-off figure was £40.1 million. We should bear it in mind that Opposition Front Benchers have been running around saying that hundreds and hundreds of millions of pounds will be written off. They will not be. That will be in the published accounts today.