The Universal Credit crunch

Exactly three years ago, The Spectator devoted its cover to a revolutionary proposal for welfare reform. The proposed Universal Credit seemed, then, to be one of those ideas too sensible actually to be implemented. It proposed replacing the rotten, complex layers of benefits with a single system that paved the way to work rather than dependency. Its goal was as simple as it was audacious: that everyone should be able to keep a significant chunk of the money they earn. The welfare trap, in which so many millions are caught, would be dismantled.

Its author, Iain Duncan Smith, had then abandoned hope of getting back into government, which perhaps explains his boldness. The Department for Work and Pensions has more out-of-work ‘clients’ (as it calls them) than the combined populations of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. To change the way these ‘clients’ are treated is the equivalent of overturning a country within a country. It seemed impossible. But when Duncan Smith was put in charge of welfare reform, it was a sign that the government was prepared for the upheaval. It would no longer tolerate a welfare system that was mass-producing the very poverty it was designed to eradicate.

Two years on, the fight seems to be draining from the government. Treasury officials have been against Duncan Smith from the start, due to the threat which Universal Credit posed to their beloved tax credits. Ambition in itself is looked down upon by ministers who deride ‘IDS’s grand projet’. Sir Jeremy Heywood, the civil servant effectively running Britain, is letting it be known that he is ‘sceptical’ about Duncan Smith’s mission. This, in Whitehall, is the equivalent of a go-slow order. Civil servants will not waste time or personal capital on anything likely to join the identity cards and the NHS supercomputer in the graveyard of ministerial follies.