MPs question support for vulnerable under UC

Tue,8 April 2014
News

The latest Work and Pensions Committee report on Universal Credit (UC) implementation highlights DWP’s need to provide more detail on the support it intends to provide for vulnerable people when UC is finally rolled out.

The Work and Pensions Committee - Fifth Report: Universal Credit implementation: monitoring DWP's performance in 2012-13 finds that, although the Government has acknowledged that vulnerable people will need support to adjust to Universal Credit, these concerns have been hidden by the massive problems with IT, which the report also highlights.

“Although the public debate about UC in the last six months has been dominated by problems with IT systems, ensuring that vulnerable people are not excluded from, or disadvantaged by, UC should remain a priority for the Government.”

In 2013 the Government published its Universal Credit Local Support Services Framework (LSSF) which broadly set out plans for support for vulnerable people but since then no detail has been provided as to how this support will operate in practice and crucially, on the amount of central funding that would be provided for this support.

The Work and Pensions Committee report recommends that the DWP must ensure that detailed information about the LSSF's funding and operation is set out when the final version is published in autumn 2014, to enable its LSSF partners to plan and budget for their new responsibilities.

Other key points made in the report:

  • Problems with IT systems – The DWP has already spent a great deal of money on IT and software (£40 million written off as of no further use and £90 million with a useful life expectancy of 5 years). The report is concerned at the “snail’s pace” of UC roll out and the fact that the DWP is operating two separate IT systems, one for UC pathfinder areas and the other for the national roll out.
  • The report criticises the DWP for hampering the committee by failing to provide information, providing information late and announcing sudden policy changes when it is about to be held to account in a public select  committee evidence session.