Universal Credit

Lord Martin of Springburn Excerpts

Tuesday 10th December 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Freud]

My Lords, I need to remind the noble Lord that the system went live, as he put it, earlier than October—it went live last April. We have a pathfinder which is learning extraordinary amounts. In particular, I remind noble Lords that we have established that the link between universal credit and the real-time information system works. The real-time information system that we were able to announce earlier is now fully up and running, with 99% of people on PAYE feeding through into it.

[Lord Martin of Springburn (CB)]

I do not rise to criticise universal credit but to put on record the great worry in the community-based housing associations that levels of arrears will rise. That is a worry for them. Could the Minister look into that?

[Lord Freud]

I thank the noble Lord for that. We have spent a lot of time bottoming out this issue. Clearly, incorporating housing benefit into universal credit is an absolutely central part of what we are trying to do, but it was essential that we did not get to a position that undermined the finances of the social housing industry. That is why we ran the demonstration housing projects. From those, we have created a system which means that we will have switchbacks after two months and an early alert after one month. There is a very effective underpinning for the finances of housing associations.