Iain Duncan Smith’s cat
Posted: November 26, 2014 Filed under: Universal credit, Welfare reform | Tags: DWP, Iain Duncan Smith Leave a commentIn the wake of yet more delays and questions about value for money, I wonder what Erwin Schrödinger would have made of universal credit.
In the Austrian physicist’s famous thought experiment, a cat is placed in a sealed box with a flask of poison and a radioactive substance. The decay of a single atom of the substance during the test will trigger a hammer that breaks the flask and kills the cat. The point is that an external observer cannot know whether or not the atom has decayed, the poison has been released and the cat is dead unless they open the box. Since we cannot know, the cat is both alive and dead.
Schrödinger’s Cat was meant to illustrate a paradox in quantum theory but it could just as easily be applied to Iain Duncan Smith’s flagship welfare reform. It’s not just that universal credit is meant to be simple and transparent but is actually fiendishly complicated and impossible for outsiders to understand. These have become givens over the last couple of years. IDS’s cat also exists in two states at the same time and we cannot know whether it is alive or dead until we open the box or see it in action. Read the rest of this entry »
Double vision
Posted: October 28, 2014 Filed under: Television, Universal credit, Welfare reform | Tags: Channel 4 1 CommentUniversal credit came under scrutiny on TV and radio last night and whether you look from above or below things are not looking good.
Dispatches on Channel 4 covered the problems from below by looking at the experience in Warrington, where the job centre was one of the first to pilot the new all-in-one benefit. We heard from a succession of people whose claims were delayed, or processed wrongly or were simply not told what was happening and from Golden Gates Housing Trust on the problems this has caused.
The pilots are of course only meant to cover the simplest cases. However, single people don’t necessarily stay single: Jay moved in with his girlfriend and baby and found himself in a nightmare of delayed payments and rent arrears. ‘Me, my partner and my child will be homeless and you just don’t know what’s going on,’ he said. Jay started off as a fan of universal credit but they survived on coffee and crisps until the problems were sorted out.
-> Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Shuffling the deck
Posted: July 16, 2014 Filed under: Bedroom tax, Civil service, Housebuilding, Planning, Universal credit | Tags: Brandon Lewis, Eric Pickles, Iain Duncan Smith Leave a commentSo housing seems to have kept the politicians who should have gone and lost the one who was making a difference.
Speculation ahead of the reshuffle suggested that Eric Pickles and Iain Duncan Smith would leave their posts as part of the cull of middle aged men in the Cabinet. True, some of the stories seemed a bit thin (a woman with a posh accent overheard talking on the phone didn’t seem like much to go on) but I lived in hope. I also looked forward to the DWP press release arguing that it proved that universal credit is ‘on track and on schedule’.
Instead it’s business as usual at the top of their two departments with a shake-up lower down the ministerial scale. After just over nine months in the job, Kris Hopkins is now the former housing minister and is shunted sideways into local government. Brandon Lewis moves from that job and gets a promotion to minister of state for housing and planning. Penny Mordaunt comes in as junior minister responsible for coastal communities.
-> Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Many unhappy returns to the bedroom tax
Posted: April 1, 2014 Filed under: Bedroom tax, Housing benefit, Universal credit, Welfare reform | Tags: Esther McVey, Iain Duncan Smith 3 CommentsStop carping, you lot. The removal of the spare room subsidy is a success.
Today is of course the first of the month as well as the first anniversary of the introduction of the bedroom tax and a wave of other welfare reforms. But I am paraphrasing Iain Duncan Smith and Esther McVey rather than making a token effort at an April Fool.
Yesterday’s work and pensions questions brought inevitable attacks on the policy that has caused so much controversy since its introduction a year ago.
Labour’s Kate Green quoted last week’s reports from the BBC that just 6 per cent of households affected by the bedroom tax have managed to move and from Real Life Reform that eight out of ten are in debt and their borrowing is increasing by £52 a week. ‘Rather than preaching about careful budgeting, why do Ministers not just scrap this hated and unworkable tax, which is sending people spiralling into debt? Read the rest of this entry »
Mixed messages
Posted: January 23, 2014 Filed under: Buy to let, Housing benefit, Private renting, Universal credit | Tags: Fergus and Judith Wilson, housing benefit, private landlords Leave a commentSo are private landlords about to pull out of the housing benefit market or not?
It’s one of the most crucial questions for the future of the housing system but the answer may be more complex than recent publicity suggests.
The alarm was raised when Fergus and Judith Wilson, the King and Queen of buy to let, revealed that they were evicting all of their tenants on benefit. A poll yesterday by the website spareroom.co.uk found that only 18 per cent of landlords currently rent to claimants, down from a third two years ago.
Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
The hardest word
Posted: January 14, 2014 Filed under: Bedroom tax, Housing benefit, Universal credit, Welfare reform | Tags: Iain Duncan Smith Leave a commentA remarkable thing happened iyesterday: Iain Duncan Smith used a five-letter word beginning with S.
Apologising for a mistake is just about the last thing any minister wants to do, but IDS got his chance when Labour’s John Healey asked him at work and pensions questions about the DWP’s bulletin admitting the pre-1996 under-occupation penalty error. Healey quoted the latest survey from the Northern Housing Consortium that ‘nearly half of all frontline housing workers have dealt with someone who has threatened to commit suicide’ largely because of the government’s welfare changes. ‘Will he apologise this afternoon to those people for the concern and chaos that he is causing?’
Duncan Smith replied: ‘I said it all right, and I say it again: the Department is, and I am, absolutely sorry that anybody may have been caught up in this who should not have been.’ So not just an apology but a double ‘sorry’ from both the secretary of state and his department. But before anyone gets too excited, he went on:
Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Universal debit
Posted: November 7, 2013 Filed under: Universal credit, Welfare reform Leave a commentAs we wait for the rescue plan, yet more scathing criticism of the universal credit will surprise nobody.
Today’s report from the Public Accounts Committee is a follow-up to September’s critical review by the National Audit Office but the weight of detail only confirms the impression of a project that long ago spun out of control.
Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Out of credit
Posted: September 5, 2013 Filed under: Civil service, Universal credit Leave a commentTake your pick of today’s official criticisms of the universal credit. It was over-ambitious and high risk, it had no clear plan and it has offered poor value for money.
Has the National Audit Office (NA0) ever delivered a more damning verdict on a key government policy than the one it has just published?
Think of just about every rumour you’ve heard about the IT system, every assumption about the chaos behind the scenes and every time you reacted sceptically to DWP assurances that the latest changes to the timetable were all part of the original plan, and you will find them all in the report published today.
Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Jules Birch 