Universal Credit — Statement

Part of the debate – in the House of Lords at 3:07 pm on 10 December 2013.

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Photo of Lord Freud Lord Freud The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions 3:07, 10 December 2013

My Lords, with the leave of the House, I shall now repeat in the form of a Statement the Answer given by my right honourable friend the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions to an Urgent Question in another place on universal credit. The Statement is as follows:

“Universal credit is a major and challenging reform which will transform the welfare state in Britain for the better, ultimately accounting for £70 billion of benefit spending each year, with 3 million people better off. Rightly, for a programme of this scale, the Government’s priority has been, and continues to be, its safe and secure delivery. This has been demonstrated throughout our approach to date, which started with the successful launch of the pathfinder in April 2013 and has continued with the controlled expansion of universal credit, starting as planned in October 2013 and running through to spring 2014.

What is more, we are already pushing ahead with the cultural and business change required as part of universal credit, retraining 25,000 Jobcentre Plus advisers, implementing digital jobcentres and rolling out the new claimant commitment, which is now on track to be in place in half of all jobcentres by the end of this year and across the country by the spring.

Yesterday, I announced and discussed at length with the Work and Pensions Select Committee our plans for the next stage of implementing universal credit, following my department’s work over recent months with the Government Digital Service to assess delivery options. That work has explored the use of the latest digital technologies, and assessed the utility of the work we have done to date, through the universal credit pathfinder, going forward. The conclusions of this work were set out yesterday.

First, as part of the wider transformation in developing digital services, the department will further develop the work started by GDS to test and implement an enhanced digital service. This will be capable of delivering the full scope of universal credit and will make provision for all claimant types. Meanwhile, we will expand our current service and develop functionality so that, from next summer, we progressively start to take claims for universal credit from couples and, in the autumn, from families.

Once the service is safely tested in the 10 live universal credit areas, we will expand the rollout to cover the north-west of England. This will enable us to learn from the live running of universal credit at scale and for more claimant types, including the more vulnerable and complex, while extending to more people the positive benefits of universal credit.

Ninety per cent of people in the pathfinder are claiming universal credit online and 78% are confident about their ability to budget with monthly payments. It pays to work, with 65% of claimants reporting that UC offers better work incentives than JSA, and it is less complex, upheld by the 65% who agreed that it was easier to understand their obligations.

As we progress with the future delivery of this flagship programme, we will continue the same careful approach—test, learn and implement—rolling out through the regions. On this basis, our current planning assumption is that the universal credit service will be fully available in each part of Great Britain during 2016, with our having closed down new claims to the legacy benefits that it replaced and the vast majority of the remaining legacy caseload moving to universal credit during 2016 and 2017. Final decisions on these elements of the programme will be informed by the development of the enhanced digital solution”.