Disastrous universal credit IT system hangs in balance as Iain Duncan Smith quits

Op-ed: Ex-minister, who repeatedly hit “reset” on chaotic omni-dole project, backs out.

Kelly Fiveash – Mar 21, 2016 1:00 pm | 24

Iain Duncan Smith—the quiet man of Tory politics—exploded with fury over the past few days, by resigning from his job as work and pensions minister, and lambasting the chancellor of the exchequer’s budget for seemingly bringing a gun to a knife fight. The knives in question, IDS will tell you, have for years been wielded to slash benefits waved through by the secretary of state. Now, all of sudden, we’re told George Osborne has gone too far.

Behind the headlines, however, it’s worth noting the timing of IDS’s resignation, which comes not only as the former cabinet minister remains among a number of rebels within the senior ranks of the Conservative Party to back the Brexit campaign, but also as he faces up to the failure of the crashingly expensive, heavily delayed, gaffe-prone universal credit project—which included development of an IT system to help combine six benefits into one payment system.

Universal credit—which was originally projected to lift £2.4 billion from the public purse up to April 2023, but costs are understood to have ballooned—has been dogged by problems ever since its inception in 2010. Until last Friday, Duncan Smith had led the chaotic and lumpen welfare reform programme from one disaster to another, while continuing to insist that universal credit wasn’t broken, despite it being hamstrung by poor management, bad decision-making, and costly tech implementation blunders.

A deadline to bring in universal credit by 2017 was missed several times as more and more taxpayer cash was ploughed into the project. Along the way millions of pounds in IT assets were written off. The fiasco around universal credit has also been steeped in secrecy, with IDS’s department desperately scrabbling to keep details of its failures away from public scrutiny.

The department for work and pensions (DWP) has been repeatedly ordered to disclose details under Freedom of Information requests about the flagging project, only for officials working for Duncan Smith to decline to release the potentially damning universal credit reports. It’s a merry go-round at the DWP, which just last week was told once again by the first-tier general regulatory chamber—which handles appeals against decisions made by government regulatory bodies on a number of cases—that it has 28 days to disclose the documents, or else appeal against the latest ruling to hand over the info.

Late last month, the public accounts committee roasted Duncan Smith’s omni-dole project, and attacked the DWP’s “evasive” tactics. The panel’s chair Meg Hillier said at the time: “The lack of transparency surrounding a programme with such wide-reaching implications for so many people is completely unacceptable.”

The MPs noted that universal credit now had a deadline of 2021—some four years later than the original date set for the roll out of Duncan Smith’s flagship programme to six million benefits claimants in the UK. Significantly, that deadline kicked the supposed completion of universal credit into the next parliament, when IDS might perhaps have been expecting to be looking on from the sidelines.

Turns out, the quiet man is now watching from the bench a little sooner than anyone might have expected. Still think his resignation is merely about Osborne’s disability benefits cut? Think again.