Lord Haskel
Main Page: Lord Haskel (Labour - Life peer)(7 years, 7 months ago)
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Lord Young of Cookham
I am grateful to my noble friend for her welcome and I miss sitting next to her in this House. The WFTC is a complex system and in the Statement and response that my honourable friend gave in the other place, she referred to the complexity. As I said in response to an earlier question, all these cases will over a period of time—some six or seven years—be migrating to universal credits. We hope to learn from the complexity to which my noble friend referred in devising a better system than the one we have.
Lord Haskel (Lab)
The Minister spoke of 150 staff being taken on to do this work. Will new staff be taken on or will existing HMRC staff be stretched still further?
Lord Young of Cookham
The answer is the latter but I would not use precisely those words. I would say that HMRC may have to reorder its priorities to cope with this additional responsibility.