So the government has finally worked out that it isn’t a good idea to charge benefit-claimants 55 pence a minute to listen to piped music while they wait for someone to deal with their claim. But how ridiculous that no-one saw it coming, and that it look so long to correct a problem that should have shown up from the beginning as political dynamite. At this rate it will only be another few months before work and pensions secretary David Gauke works out, too, that making people wait six weeks for their first payment is costing the government far more politically than it is saving the Exchequer. A few months after that it just might finally click with him that it isn’t a good idea to try to make Universal Credit ‘digital by default’ when many of those making claims are, by definition, too poor to have smartphones, computers or internet connections. Allowing people to claim online might sound terribly modern yet it defeats what should be one of the purposes of welfare reform: to make sure that claimants actually exist and that they are living in Britain. Invite them to turn up at an office in order to initiate a claim and you deal with that problem from the outset.
The tragedy is that the government’s tin ear over the problems associated with Universal Credit has put at risk what is fundamentally a transformative policy. Ministers should have been in a position today to be able to hail a piece of evidence as to its success – yet another fall in unemployment. The jobless figure fell by 52,000 to 1.4 million, the lowest level in 42 years and confounding those who, like Kenneth Clarke when he was Chancellor, used to take it for granted that unemployment was a structural problem which would ratchet up with every economic cycle.
Universal Credit, of course, is not the only story behind the unemployment figures. Flexible labour laws are another important part. But reducing unemployment was exactly what Universal Credit was supposed to achieve. Its whole rationale was based on the need to eliminate the benefits trap, whereby unemployed people were discouraged from getting a job because it would make them financially worse-off. Rather than be caught in a trap, claimants of Universal Credit are allowed to keep enough of their benefits to ensure that they can be confident work will always pay.
There should have been no need for the government to go on the defensive. Theresa May should have been able to look Jeremy Corbyn in the eye across the despatch box today and hail the unemployment figures as a triumph. You explain, she should have been able to tell him, why we have been able to get closer to full unemployment than either of the two last Labour governments and what you think would happen if we allowed the benefits trap to slip back into the system.
Universal Credit should be one of the Conservatives’ proudest policies. Instead, poor political execution has forced the government into retreat.
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