Public Accounts Committee
Oral evidence: Universal Credit: Recall, HC 601
Monday 07 December 2015
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 07 December 2015
Watch the meeting: http://parliamentlive.tv/event/index/89198f1b-306b-40f1-a0fa-6e7a22ac129c?in=16:04:52
Members present: Meg Hillier (Chair); Mr Richard Bacon; Deidre Brock; Caroline Flint; Kevin Foster; Nigel Mills; David Mowat; Stephen Phillips; John Pugh; Karin Smyth
Adrian Jenner, Director of Parliamentary Relations, National Audit Office; Max Tse, Director, NAO; Paul Oliffe, Director, NAO; and Marius Gallaher, Alternate Treasury Officer of Accounts, HM Treasury, were in attendance.
Witnesses: Robert Devereux, Permanent Secretary, Department for Work and Pensions; Neil Couling, Director General and Senior Responsible Owner for the universal credit programme, DWP; and James Bowler, Director General, Tax and Welfare, Her Majesty’s Treasury, gave evidence.
Q1 Chair: Welcome to this afternoon’s meeting of the Public Accounts Committee. This is our first recall session of this parliamentary term. We are calling back civil servants to answer issues raised in reports that we have made. You responded in a Treasury minute with which we are not entirely happy, so we want to talk to you further about what was said.
The witnesses on our first panel are: James Bowler from HM Treasury, where he is director general of tax and welfare; Robert Devereux, the permanent secretary at the Department for Work and Pensions—again; and Neil Couling, who is the director general of the universal credit programme, Department for Work and Pensions. That gives a clue to what we are here to discuss: the Treasury minutes that you provided to us on universal credit. We have called you back because we made some recommendations when we saw you in February as a result of that report, and we are not sure that we are happy with the responses, which we felt were rather weak and lacking in specifics. We felt that you were a bit unwilling to take any further action as a result of our report. I remind you, and everybody else, that we are here to make sure that there is real clarity on this important programme, for the public who will receive the service and for the taxpayers who will pay for it.
We want to focus on this for about 45 minutes today, so we want to be quite quick in our questions, and we would appreciate it if you were quick in your answers. We have done a lot of work, so we know this subject quite well—and you know it even better. We do not need to demonstrate our knowledge to each other; we can just focus on the questions. We acknowledge that this programme has stabilised since we first looked at it, when it was very problematic and there were pretty worrying signs. A year ago, it finally became more stable, but it is still creeping along with inefficient systems, and there are issues around the business case, the continuing risks of delay, and the lack of transparency and clear milestones. Those are some of the subjects that we want to look at today.
I should just mention, Mr Devereux, that your Department sent round a memorandum on Thursday after 5 o’clock. Given that MPs were in their constituencies by that point, I cannot guarantee that Members will have looked at it, so we will not focus on anchoring on that. We have questions on our report, the NAO’s previous work and the Treasury minutes—that is what we will focus on. Before I hand over to Caroline Flint and Stephen Phillips, who will lead on this, the NAO highlighted the delays a year ago, and we are still concerned. We note that, in its assessment for the spending review in November, the OBR talked about its “forecast judgement of a further six-month delay to the managed migration phase of the UC rollout.” The OBR’s chart shows that, at each stage, the roll-out has about a six-month delay, and it projects that six-month delay to be ongoing. Do you have any comments about that? Will you ever get to the point where you are on target? Do you agree with the OBR’s analysis?
Robert Devereux: The last time we came, we had five milestones in the public domain. Four of those we have met, and one of them we have changed slightly. The consequence of changing that milestone, as I will explain in a moment, is the reason why we now assess the programme as amber, not as amber/red. If I tell you what the five were, the four that we haven’t changed—
Q2 Chair: Sorry, I asked you about the six-month delay.
Robert Devereux: I am giving you the context in which it occurs, because there are a lot of moving parts. We said that we would finish rolling out the current service around the country this year; we are going to do that. We said that we would start the digital service in May; we will start it in May. We said that we would start managed migration in ’18; we will. We said that we would finish the bulk of that near the end of ’19; we will. The only thing that has changed is this: when the full service starts in May, we had originally planned on going out to rather more than the five jobcentres a month that we now propose. We are consciously starting slower from May through to about Christmas of next year, and the consequence of starting at five, rather than the 50 that we will eventually get to, is that it takes you longer to get through to the 700.
Q3 Chair: That’s the reason?
Robert Devereux: The OBR said that perhaps we would not start in May. We are starting in May, but we are consciously starting slightly slower to make sure that we have some contingency to manage against it. A programme that would otherwise have taken 18 months will now take a bit longer.
Q4 Chair: The roll-out is 50 a month from 2017, isn’t it?
Robert Devereux: From the back end of 2016-17, yes, depending on how the five goes.
Q5 Chair: Could you not have foreseen that there would be a lot of over-optimistic predictions about the pace of roll-out?
Robert Devereux: All I can tell you is that I have now come back three times, and each time the delivery assessment of this programme has got better.
Chair: I acknowledged that at the beginning.
Robert Devereux: But the principal reason it has got better this year, relative to the last time I was here, is this particular change: the thing that previously we were trying to think about is, “Actually, if we start this service on time,” which we will, “will we be confident rolling it out at the rate of 50 a month from month one?” Our conclusion is that it would be smarter to have some contingency in it. Last time I came, you wanted to know what the contingency was. You were asking me whether I was going to have the live service as contingency. Our conclusion is that this is the better way to do it, and that has been reflected in the judgments I have set out.
Q6 Chair: Colleagues will touch more on the contingency. I think one of the concerns is that these roll-outs are so small, and that you have a number of manual work-arounds; once you ramp it up, there are real worries. The OBR’s projections have been pretty consistent.
Robert Devereux: The OBR said we would start late, and we are not starting late. We are taking a judgment about how soon to take it out in the first period. When you talk about the work-arounds, you are talking about the current service. The service that is currently being tested and that we are rolling out—the full service—is a complete service, and it does not have those work-arounds in it, so let us be clear about apples and apples.
Q7 Chair: I am just quoting here from the OBR: “Our assumption of a further delay reduces the marginal cost of UC in our forecast as cases are migrated later.” The second part of that is a technical point about how they judge the costings of it, but they talk about this assumption of a further delay. Do you disagree, then, with the OBR?
Robert Devereux: I will let Neil correct me if I get this wrong, but we gave them a plan last time that was going to start in May ’16 and finish at the end of ’17. They decided to shift the whole thing six months to the right. What we have actually done is—
Chair: Could you speak up a bit?
Robert Devereux: I am sorry. When we went in, we gave them a plan that said we would start in May ’16 with the full service, and roll it round the country by the end of ’17. They chose to shift the whole plan six months to the right. What we have actually done is say that we will start on time; we will finish at the same point that they think we are going to finish at, in the middle of ’18.
Q8 Chair: Well, you have made that commitment and we will keep a close watch on that, I am sure.
Robert Devereux: Do. I gave you the other commitments, too, just to be clear about the fact that there are other things going on which are milestones, which you were asking me for; and we have consistently, now, had these for a year. That is the one change.
Q9 Chair: Right, but one of the points that my colleagues will get into is that people need to understand what is happening and to be clear. There was a very good point: you may be aware of research done by Citizens Advice—I am sorry, I cannot lay my hands on it right now—that talks about being very much in favour of it, but worried about some of the challenges, particularly around staff training and making sure that people are aware of what is going on. We think that, whatever you have just said to me, out there, people on the frontline receiving it, and people who are helping people get administrative support in dealing with it, are just worried. Even people who are in favour of the scheme are worried about the impacts of delays on constituents, and the impact of staff not being on top of it enough and what that might mean. I will hand straight over to Caroline Flint, who will go into the business case in more detail and ask you some questions on that.
Q10 Caroline Flint: Good afternoon. Mr Bowler, I was not here, but your colleague Sharon White told the Committee last year what the expectation was for the outline business case. I am watching my terminology here: after agreement on the strategic business case in September 2014, the outline business case, which as I understand it was to provide much more detail on the numbers, the learning and what have you, should be completed by summer 2015. Where are we?
James Bowler: The outline business case is completed. The Chief Secretary signed it off last week, and the draft outline business case went into a major project assessment of the overall universal credit scheme, which gave a report that said that delivery is improving. On the back of that report, the Chief Secretary used some of the evidence of the economic benefits being delivered in universal credit to sign it off, and set spending review assumptions accordingly. The chronology was a draft outline business case, a major projects assessment review, the full business case, and the spending review. We signed all those things off.
Q11 Caroline Flint: Hang on; just so I have understood, because there are a lot of business cases floating around here—
James Bowler: Sorry, it is complicated, yes.
Q12 Caroline Flint: So the outline business case, which was the promise from last September: that was signed off last week.
James Bowler: Received and signed off, yes.
Q13 Caroline Flint: You received it from DWP last week?
James Bowler: No.
Caroline Flint: So when did you receive it from DWP?
James Bowler: We had a draft of it, which went into a major process, and that led to a final one in November that we signed off last week.
Q14 Caroline Flint: When did the draft come in?
James Bowler: The draft came in during September to inform a major projects assessment review of universal credit, and that reported in October.
Q15 Caroline Flint: Out of interest, why has it not been made public that it has been signed off, if it was signed off last week?
James Bowler: I am happy to make it public.
Q16 Caroline Flint: You have made it public today, but the question is on the recommendations by the Committee in February— [Interruption.] Can we speak one at a time? I think one of the recommendations was that it should be more transparent. I am interested to know why that announcement could not have been made last week.
James Bowler: It could have been.
Q17 Caroline Flint: Okay. When we heard from your colleague before, there was some discussion about what the detailed outline business case that has arrived and now been signed off should contain. The Treasury said that that outline business case should contain: “The target architecture for digital service systems, based on an agreed position about the level of re-use of existing systems…The target operating model for Universal Credit in its steady state, incorporating evidence the Department has gained from its test and learn approach…The financial and economic case, with improved forecasts of costs and benefits based as far as possible on evidence from the live service.” Would you like to expand on how the outline business case, which was signed off last week, met those three asks?
James Bowler: It met them pretty well. The big thing, particularly since Sharon gave evidence to the Committee previously—
Q18 Chair: Sorry, just for anyone watching who might not know who Sharon is, can you give her formal title?
James Bowler: Sharon White, the then second permanent secretary of the Treasury, gave evidence to you in 2014. We now have an end-to-end process agreed for universal credit, which was one of the big requests from the strategic outline business case. We have agreed a start date for the national roll-out of the digital service. We have a full cost-benefit analysis of universal credit in that outline business case. I cannot recall the other issues that you raised.
Q19 Caroline Flint: The other issues were the evidence-based forecasts of costs and benefits, and what has been learned from the test and learn approach. The twin-track system was brought in. In previous sessions and previous NAO Reports, it was recognised that the whole system of moving was going to cost more, because of the twin track, but that it was de-risking the whole process.
James Bowler: That is correct. The outline business case recommends that we complete the national roll-out of the live service, which will happen by April 2016. It showed that the costs of doing that are very much outweighed by the benefits, and we have agreed to do that roll-out. We are also rolling the live service into the digital service a little earlier than we previously said, partly in response to some of your concerns about whether there were nugatory costs involved in going through the twin-track approach.
Q20 Caroline Flint: In terms of the outline business case that you have signed off, how much do you feel that you have more evidence or reassurance that, as the system rolls out and gets to those cases that are more complex than just jobseekers and mainly single people—how much more evidence did you gain from this latest exercise to reassure you that the system was going to be up to meeting that challenge?
James Bowler: There is more evidence on the cost-benefit analysis and more evidence on the economic benefit of the live service so far, which the DWP is publishing. This is a massive project that will continue to be rolled out. There continue to be risks. We have asked the DWP to focus on certain areas to ensure that we look to manage those risks, and it has agreed to do that. Those risks are some of the ones that you have set out, such as the need to ensure that the DWP works closely with local authorities, particularly with the more complex cases. Local authorities have on-the-ground experience of dealing with complex housing benefit cases. We are also keen that there is a framework for recording the economic benefits that we gain going forward as we roll out digital. The outline business case is a good place, but we will get a lot more data as we roll out the digital service, and we will need to watch closely the risks that you set out.
Q21 Caroline Flint: There have been quite a lot of changes as well, both in the Budget and in the autumn statement. Having obviously signed off this outline business case, have the changes to work incentives that were announced changed the underlying numbers in the business case?
James Bowler: The outline business case records the changes that were announced to universal credit after the summer Budget, and it includes them in the net present value and cost-benefit analysis that it records there. So, yes, those changes are included.
Q22 Caroline Flint: They have all been factored in?
James Bowler: Yes. Well, I should say that the tax credit changes that were announced in the autumn statement came after the outline business case.
Q23 Caroline Flint: Are you looking at them now? How will you factor those changes in, because obviously you have just signed off a week ago and you have just said you haven’t factored in the latest changes?
James Bowler: The steady-state case for universal credit remains exactly the same, which is the benefits to work incentives, particularly through the lower taper that you are getting in tax credits, the administrative savings and the savings in fraud and error.
Q24 Caroline Flint: My understanding, and maybe Mr Devereux might want to come in here, was that the changes to universal credit are something like £100 million in savings; that is what is meant to come out of universal credit. And over the next five years, that could be a further £9.5 billion, which particularly affects those people in work, and some concern has been raised about how that will impact upon people’s willingness to find work and to stay in work.
Could you tell me how those things have been factored into this? I ask because obviously one of the net benefits or outcomes of all this is to get more people into work and so they can make progression in work, so that they won’t plateau at, say, 10 hours, without moving forward, to make it worthwhile for them to work longer. Maybe I did not quite understand previously just how that has been factored into agreeing this outline business case, and whether it is the case that people in universal credit who are in work will be worse off than previously.
James Bowler: The best way to point things out is that the steady-state case for universal credit remains, so the work incentives remain; it will pay you to work and it will pay you to work more, particularly because of the 65p taper in universal credit. Then, the two benefits over and above that will be, first, a saving in fraud and error, particularly from using real-time information on people’s earnings, and, secondly, we expect a relatively large saving in administration, as people don’t have to fill in multiple forms and all the rest of it in the jobcentre. Those will remain in universal credit. What you are seeing on tax credits is a transition, as the Chancellor put it, as personal allowance and the national living wage are increased.
Q25 Caroline Flint: Okay, so all those factors have to come in to uplift them, even though there are cuts in what they will get from work support through the universal credit. Is that correct? That will compensate them. That is what you are trying to say, is it?
James Bowler: The one area where you will see a slight increase in costs is transitional protection, which is in the autumn statement numbers. So the people who DWP move from the stock of tax credits to universal credit receive transitional protection, and that will increase with tax credits being more generous than they were in the summer Budget, with the change to tax credits announced in the autumn statement.
Robert Devereux: The principal benefit that we will get out of spending £1.7 billion of investment is to secure what is estimated to be £3 billion a year on the labour market. So, £3 billion a year savings on the labour market for £1.7 billion investment—that’s basically the business case in a nutshell. That £3 billion a year is because it remains the case, even with the summer Budget changes, that the incentives to be in work are strong and clear, and the transition from being out of work to in work is straightforward.
Those things have always been true of universal credit; they are true in the future, too. The relative size of the amount of money paid out of work and in work can change, but the critical thing about it is this: are you still better off in work and can you still comprehend that every pound you earn for every hour you work makes you better off? So long as those two things are still true, the Chancellor may make changes to the absolute levels of both these things without making any difference to the work incentive effect, because when universal credit is fully there, there will no other benefit; it is just out of work will get x pounds, and in work y pounds. Can my job advisers look you in the eye and say, “Take that job over there. You will be better for whatever it is: 40 hours; 20 hours; 10 hours”? That remains the case in universal credit and that is the principle underpinning the £3 billion a year of estimated labour market benefits set against the £1.7 billion one-off cost of doing it all.
Q26 Chair: As Caroline Flint highlighted—I am sure she will go into this more—one of the issues is that if you are on the higher rate of tax credits and you go into work and then come out of work again, you may not be so much better off.
Robert Devereux: For people who are currently on tax credits who then make a change into universal credit, there is an entirely different world of transitional protection. We have to recognise that when you write a business case, you are looking at what would be the case in a steady state when all that has washed out of the system. You are right that there is something going on in tax credits, but that is allowed for in the arithmetic through transitional protection. I am sorry it is so complicated.
Q27 Caroline Flint: On the transitional protection, how much will that cover the current level of claim? Have you worked out how much that will cost?
James Bowler: The OBR costed the change in the cost of transitional protection at the autumn statement, and I think it was about £150 million by the last year—2020-21. They have released a paper that sets that out.
Q28 Caroline Flint: But as the Chair said, if someone is on a higher rate of tax credit and they come off that, they will not get anything if they go back on—is that right? If an existing claimant stops claiming for some reason and then goes back in, they have to start afresh on the lower rates. What about people who are, for example, currently not in work and go into work? How are they covered by the reductions that I understand there are with universal credit?
Robert Devereux: The people who are not in work and go into work are covered in the same way I just explained. They will have an out-of-work entitlement to universal credit, and they will have one of the higher entitlements to work under universal credit, so the work incentive—the difference between being out of work and in work—is preserved. For people who are currently in work who transition across with transitional protection, we are making sure they are no worse off under any circumstances with universal credit, but they are already in work; the thing that drives the business case is more people going into work, not so much the people staying in it.
Q29 Caroline Flint: The Secretary of State apparently said on “The Andrew Marr Show” that “nobody loses a penny” from cuts to in-work support as a result of cuts to the universal credit programme. Is that correct?
Neil Couling: I think he went on to say that for anybody moving from tax credits into universal credit, because of the transfer protection, as Robert and James explained—in 2018, as part of our plan, we start moving people off tax credits into universal credit, and for them, there is cash protection. If their entitlement to universal credit is lower than their tax credit entitlement, we will top up the amount to the level of the tax credit entitlement, and that is what the Secretary of State was talking about.
Q30 Caroline Flint: Perhaps it would be useful to have a note on that.
Robert Devereux: Shall we give you a note on transitional protection?
Chair: It would be very helpful, because it is not just an issue for this Committee; colleagues from around the House have raised it with us.
Q31 Caroline Flint: May I ask about contingency plans? That has come up in evidence before. Obviously, everybody accepts there were very good reasons to move to this twin-track approach, although there clearly are concerns about delays and the complexity of the claimants as we move forward on this programme. There is also the issue around the existing IT systems—a live system compared with the perfect digital service system that is apparently down the road. In terms of signing off the outline business case, how much did you delve into the detail of that? What were your thoughts on what those contingency planning options might look like?
James Bowler: What we have asked DWP to do by way of contingency, going forward, is to have contingencies around the key deliverables of the digital service. The digital service is happening. It will be rolled out nationally from May 2016. We have said that we want to understand the contingencies around some of the key deliverables underneath that. For example, DWP will need to use the Cabinet Office’s Verify system to make sure they can understand who people are online. If that is in any way late, they will need a contingency for that, so that is what we have asked. In terms of your point about where we were with the strategic outline business case on the live service, as I mentioned earlier, we have agreed to roll out the live service nationwide, but we have also agreed to move it into the digital service as part of that transition a little earlier than before. That will make a bit of a saving for us.
The contingency really is how fast and how far the digital service can be rolled out. Making sure that contingencies are built into that is our request to DWP as part of signing that off.
Robert Devereux: Can I add one thing which is happening literally today? The technology guys told me today that they have now virtually completed the connection between the digital service, which we have been trialling for about a year now, and our big central payments system, which is a big industrial-scale thing for pumping out millions and billions of payments. They have already connected that up with the central index, and they have now connected up to this, so as each month goes by—you are right to ask about contingency; I just wanted to clock that real progress is also being made. Previously, we would have had the contingency, but this has now been done.
Q32 Caroline Flint: Again, in previous evidence it was suggested that once the outline business case was signed off, which happened last week, it could be a year to around 18 months—that was given us as a yardstick—until the final business case. How do you see that timetable being realised?
James Bowler: We have set the date for the final business case as September 2017. The reason for that is that we will have received a lot of data and information on the cost and value for money of the roll-out of the digital service transition, but it will be just before DWP moves the stock of tax credit people across to universal credit. It is quite a key point for us to assess where things have got to and look at the new data that we have got. We will approve funding thereafter based on that full business case at the end of 2017.
Q33 Caroline Flint: Have you thought about what happens if there are any further delays? I know that Mr Devereux has given us assurance that all the milestones except one are being met, but if there were any further delays, or the systems just did not work together—or, for that matter, the complexity of the cases that will start coming on to the new procedures under universal credit—have you thought about maybe having a halfway point on this, so that anything that can be looked at could be looked at before the September 2017 deadline?
James Bowler: Yes. Our teams meet fortnightly on this, so you don’t particularly need a very formal sign-off, but I very much support what Mr Devereux said about the fact that we have chosen to do five jobcentres a month in 2016, precisely to get into the detail of how that is going, and to do the test and learn approach to consider whether we are getting the most benefits out of it and how we are doing that. I imagine that we will be looking closely at that throughout the whole of 2016. There will almost certainly be another major project assessment in that time as well, so we will not disappear now and reappear at the end of 2017 to talk to DWP; there will be fairly constant discussion.
Robert Devereux: Just for clarity, when we are talking about rolling this out further from May at the five, this has now been running for just over a year. I told you when I came last time that we had just turned on the thing. We are in three jobcentres now with a full service, so all the things that you—
Q34Chair: So it is about a quarter of a million people, isn’t it?
Robert Devereux: I was going back to the thing that we are going to be rolling out from May. It is not about “Gosh, I wonder how that’s going to go”; we have already done it for a year, albeit in small places. We are in three jobcentres now, and that is a thing which we have assessed as going sufficiently well, especially now we have made the connections I have just told you about, to support a Major Project Authority view that it is perfectly safe to start in May at the rate we are describing.
Q35 Caroline Flint: In terms of the roll-out to five jobcentres a month, how much are you looking to have some diversity in there as well, in terms of the types of area in which the roll-out will happen? Jobcentre districts, as I know from my time in the DWP, vary enormously from one region of the country to another—and from one part of the country to another, for that matter—in terms of the complexity of the cases, the number of people out of work, the number of lone parents, the number of people who are on ESA and everything else.
Neil Couling: We have already picked up Ms Flint’s point in terms of how we are going into the next prototyping phase. We have just entered the next prototyping phase, called “Make scalable”, for our digital service, and the Secretary of State just announced the five next jobcentres that will roll out the full service in that phase, one of which is Great Yarmouth, because we want to test a coastal labour market.
We have also announced Musselburgh, because we want to test in Scotland, and there are a couple of other jobcentres in Lee in south-east London, because we want to try and get some volume in a particular geography to see if that has an effect.
Q36 Caroline Flint: Final questions to Mr Bowler. How far ahead have you agreed to fund universal credit?
James Bowler: End of 2017.
Q37 Caroline Flint: From what you have said so far, the effects of any changes have been to the incentives and disregards announced since the summer Budget. You said that that has not had a massive impact on the forecast. Let me be more specific. It has not made a major difference, as far as you are concerned, on how universal credit will encourage people to work.
James Bowler: The net present value in the outline business case is pretty similar to that in the strategic outline business case, and that was after the summer Budget changes.
Q38 David Mowat: Just on the business case, it strikes me there are two ways of looking at this curate’s egg. On the one hand, you are just getting it signed off now, but you have spent two thirds of the money, so you could say that is not positive. On the other hand, I do not think I have ever seen a business case for an IT project or a business change project that is as good as this one. In fact, if these numbers are close to being right, the only issue that matters is how quickly you can deliver it. If you are going to be getting £6.7 billion a year of benefits, that is an extraordinarily high number. The costs are dwarfed by the whole thing. It is almost irrelevant what you spend to deliver £6.7 billion a year, but it prompts the question about how confident you are of delivering £6.7 billion a year. As you are rolling the whole thing out now, have you got a team looking at benefits realisation?
Robert Devereux: Sure. I have deliberately brought this thick book with me. I do not expect you to have read it, but this is the thing we published at the weekend.
Chair: Yes, we have had an analysis.
Robert Devereux: This is very relevant. This is basically a peer-reviewed analysis by my Department. It has been peer-reviewed by NIESR, so they are doing this properly. The headline result is that at 60 days, 90 days, 120 days, all the way up to nine months, at every single one of those points, people on universal credit are 7 to 8 percentage points more likely to be in work than on JSA. At nine months—
Q39 David Mowat: I asked a slightly different question. If you are going to be delivering benefits of £7 billion a year, have you got somebody in your team who is accountable to you for the delivery of those benefits?
Robert Devereux: Neil’s team.
Q40 David Mowat: I thought he was delivering the project.
Robert Devereux: That is what SROs are for.
Neil Couling: I get to deliver the project.
Q41 David Mowat: Let me ask you the question, then. Have you got somebody in your team who is responsible for delivering the £7 billion of benefits? It is a serious question. There is one thing about delivering all the IT. It is another thing to make sure that the organisation of hundreds of thousands of people deliver £7 billion a year.
Robert Devereux: We could not agree more with you. There is no point in delivering something that does not work, but you can imagine how pleased I am when I see this. This is serious research that is telling us about a very material change. I might point out, because you referred to simple people being in the system at the minute, they are single people. Let us just clock for a minute the JSA regime in the United Kingdom, which is probably one of the best regimes in the world, if not the best. If we can get 8 percentage points more than that, even for those claimants, there is something profound going on.
Q42 David Mowat: Just to be clear, the 8 percentage points you are talking about are consistent with the benefits numbers that you communicated to us.
Robert Devereux: They are.
Q43 David Mowat: I want to ask the question again: how confident are we? Is it just going to happen? How do we know these benefits, this £6.7 billion, is going to happen?
Q44 Chair: Mr Mowat has asked this question three times now, so can we get a direct answer?
Robert Devereux: I’m afraid that I have to trouble you with one small piece of economics. The business case is based on the economy being bigger as a consequence of more people being in work. What we are showing here is that labour supply effects—the supply of people wanting work—appeared to be going up. That is a prerequisite for labour demand adjusting—
Q45 David Mowat: Fine. I will now shut up on this issue. I will just say one final thing: if I were leading a programme of such importance to the Exchequer, and if I were accountable for delivering £7 billion a year, I would be absolutely sure that I had a team of people working for me who were accountable for driving that £7 billion home. I am not clear from your answers that we have that in place yet.
Robert Devereux: We do, not least because they are producing documents this thick with evidence.
Chair: Mr Couling, can you be brief?
Neil Couling: I am responsible for delivering the business case benefits. I have a team of people monitoring this and telling us the results. My team produced this piece of research that we published yesterday. There is a whole plan of evaluation working forward. The Treasury are extraordinarily interested in this, because clearly they are invested in its success given the effect on the public finances. So I am accountable, and we have a team of people doing this and driving the outcomes on this as we go forward.
Q46 David Mowat: How big is that team?
Neil Couling: Define the nature of the team? I could say 40,000 people, in terms of the people actually in jobcentres delivering this day in and day out, or I could give the answer of the 26 analysts we have got working on the actual analysis.
Chair: Okay, 26 analysts on the DWP staff. That’s fine.
Q47 Stephen Phillips: Before I come to my questions, it is a thick report that was published yesterday, so thanks for ruining all our Sundays. You repeatedly refer to the 8% figure, but it is right to get what that figure is. It is that 8% of UC claimants are more likely to have been in work at some point in the last nine months, isn’t it, Mr Devereux?
Robert Devereux: I didn’t say anything other than that. There are two pictures. In figures 6 and 7, you can see both the spot point and the—
Q48 Stephen Phillips: Indeed. So at any given time, it is between 3% and 6%, correct?
Robert Devereux: Yes.
Q49 Stephen Phillips: Right. One difficulty I found when preparing for this hearing was working out what progress has been made in implementing universal credit. One reason for that is that, apart from the five milestones to which you have drawn attention, there are no other milestones in the public domain, are there?
Robert Devereux: The ones I quoted are the ones that we put in the public domain, yes.
Q50 Stephen Phillips: Why have you not set out publicly what your remaining key milestones are for this project?
Robert Devereux: I am going to get a little bit philosophical here. At what point am I simply showing every twist and turn of the way we did the planning?
Chair: Mr Devereux, let us be clear. Mr Phillips is asking about transparency. Would you take his questioning in the direct spirit in which it is intended, and perhaps answer his question?
Q51 Stephen Phillips: There aren’t any publicly available milestones by reference to which this Committee or the taxpayer can measure the success or indeed failure of the universal credit programme.
Robert Devereux: Okay. So I would regard the five things I read out as statements of things that should occur on a date, which is what I define a milestone to be, by my Secretary of State, repeatedly. I think they are milestones.
Q52 Stephen Phillips: Right. So there are five milestones there. Four of them have been complied with, and one has slipped, as you have said. No further milestones in this project have been set. That is the difficulty that this Committee and the taxpayer have in determining whether or not the UC roll-out programme is a success.
Robert Devereux: So I guess I am in the Committee’s hands, if you would like me to think about other ones. I said that, for the current year—the year in question—we said we would roll out the current service to every jobcentre in the country. We have been reporting how many jobcentres we have got to. The total number of jobcentres is 711. When I get there, it will be complete. I am not trying to be difficult, but I am not wholly sure what an interim milestone would be. If you would like me to—
Q53 Stephen Phillips: Let me give you some ideas.
Robert Devereux: Go on, then.
Q54 Stephen Phillips: Numbers of claimants within broad categories, for example tax credits and ESA, by dates certain. No milestone has been set as to that in the public domain, but presumably you have one in the Department.
Robert Devereux: By those categories, we have got inside our internal planning what they might be, but the plan that we have in place we are governing by the larger milestones I pointed you to.
Q55 Stephen Phillips: It is internal, but it is not in the public domain, correct?
Robert Devereux: Correct. It is implicit in the—
Neil Couling: But I think—
Q56 Stephen Phillips: I will come back to you, Mr Couling. No milestones for the closing of legacy benefits, correct?
Robert Devereux: No, that is one of the milestones I quoted you. I quoted two of them, actually.
Q57 Stephen Phillips: No milestones for detail of estimated number of claims, by reference to certain dates? We have the OBR figures, but we don’t have anything from the DWP.
Robert Devereux: Again, I am going to come back to how we are running this programme. In order to make sure that we deliver it safely, we have given people a sense of what we are doing. I have told you we will do five jobcentres a month in 2016. If it turned out that there was a reason why we should go slower than that, I will adjust it down to four. I might change it, but I am not writing down a complete gamut of promises out to 2021 against which you will then consistently—
Q58 Stephen Phillips: I understand, given the history of the project, why you are reluctant to do that.
Robert Devereux: I would do it for any project, sir.
Q59 Stephen Phillips: But the trouble is, there is nothing by reference to which this Committee or the taxpayer can measure—
Robert Devereux: Apart from the five milestones I have given you.
Chair: Let Mr Phillips finish his question, please.
Q60 Stephen Phillips: There is nothing in the public domain by reference to which this Committee or the taxpayer can measure the success or failure of the roll-out of this programme.
Robert Devereux: I think we may disagree on that.
Q61 Chair: Mr Devereux, the point Mr Phillips is making—repeatedly and quite rightly—is that these are very broad-based milestones and we are now getting to the point, as you highlighted, of physical delivery on the ground and I do not think there should be any reason for the DWP to hide what the aims are. We understand that these big projects may slip at times, but knowing what the aim was and therefore enabling us to ask questions about why there has been slippage is pretty important. The Committee feel that flexibility has been used as a way of dressing up slippages, so we need to be really clear about what the targets are. That is what Mr Phillips is asking.
Robert Devereux: I understand that, so let me make an offer. I told you last year that this year we would roll out something to 700 jobcentres. We are three quarters of the way through that now, right? I have told you already that in May, in June and in July we will be rolling out to five jobcentres—my colleague just named them. So it would be perfectly possible—
Q62 Chair: You said that, and we do not disagree with the five milestones that you set out at the beginning, but Mr Phillips’s question is of a different order. It is about more detail.
Robert Devereux: I am trying to meet you halfway with the order. I have just told you today a level of detail that is not in the five milestones I have just said. It will start—
Q63 Stephen Phillips: Yes, that digital service is now connected to the central payments system, but it might have been helpful for me when I was preparing for the hearing yesterday to know that that was the case and whether it had been done to time or not. I cannot make that assessment at the moment, because you have—quite deliberately, I suggest—not put into the public domain the dates by which milestones are supposed to be achieved, which presently are internal to the Department, so neither I, nor the Committee, nor Parliament, nor the taxpayer can see whether you are behind again. That is the point, Mr Devereux.
Robert Devereux: I do understand the point. I am making you a suggestion that between now and the end of next year we will be very clear how many jobcentres we are going to roll it out to each month, right? So I could send you a note and the end of this Committee that tells you, month by month, how many jobcentres will be doing what right up to Christmas 2016. That would strike me as being not a bad metric for how we are doing.
Stephen Phillips: That is not a bad metric, but it occurs to me that there are a number of other metrics that you might usefully discuss with the NAO by reference to which the Committee and Parliament could then see that UCT is running to plan.
Q64 Karin Smyth: I would like to add that it is also important to us as MPs when dealing with our constituents. My first question to the Prime Minister in the summer was about when universal credit would come into Bristol South, to which he said “soon”. We cannot operate on the principle of soon. It has now started with the lower hanging fruit, but in the day-to-day, talking to our constituents, without the detail that Mr Phillips has been talking about, we cannot advise our constituents or go forward. It is causing a great deal of upset on the ground.
Chair: Absolutely. Ms Smyth has made the point. Will you give a brief comment on that? I think Ms Smyth has made a reasonable point—it affects people.
Robert Devereux: I think there are two different things here. It would be perfectly possible for us to be clear how many jobcentres we are going to. The question which then answers the question, “Okay, so is it mine?” we will be much clearer about when I get a bit closer. We just announced the five in May. When in practice do you think we will know what the five are in June?
Neil Couling: I promised various local authority chief executives that we will write out after Christmas on the plans for 2016 roll-outs, so I will let people know what is happening in 2016-17 just after Christmas.
Q65 Chair: Does that mean that it is a six-month notice period?
Robert Devereux: By place, that is.
Neil Couling: By place.
Q66 Chair: But when you say 2016 by Christmas, does that mean that something could happen in January or February? You talking about from May—from six months on.
Neil Couling: From the May roll-out, I will do that.
Robert Devereux: If I do it by analogy, the roll-out that we are just completing now we announced six months ago.
Q67 Chair: Just to be clear, six months is the period of notice that you are providing local authorities, local jobcentres and so on, so our constituents will know six months beforehand.
Robert Devereux: The shortest is six months, because he is going to do it over Christmas for something starting in May, but through to the following Christmas.
Q68 Chair: Maybe Mr Couling can answer for himself—I think he knows his stuff.
Neil Couling: Can I be clear on this, because it might help the Committee understand why, and it gets to the heart of Mr Phillips’s questions as well? We are working in partnership with local authorities, and we are talking to them about the best order in which to roll out universal credit. I will go to them with a list and say, “I fancy doing it this way round. How does that look to you?” For example, I just mentioned five jobcentres on the “Make scalable” phase. One of the local authorities involved there—Sedgemoor—did not want to be part of the “Make scalable” plan. How do I publish that up front and put it out? Somebody could have said, “Oh, you’re not rolling out at Sedgemoor. It’s all going wrong.” Consultation and discussion is going on as we put together the plan.
Q69 Stephen Phillips: That is not right. You have a reason why Sedgemoor was not part of the roll-out for that phase, but let’s move on. Have you shared a detailed plan—or, indeed, any plan—with local authorities and other delivery partners for the roll-out of the digital service in its entirety?
Neil Couling: No, not yet. As I explained, we are talking to them about that now.
Q70 Stephen Phillips: Sorry. Who’s “them” in that context? Is it every local authority in the country that is part of this?
Neil Couling: We are talking to local authorities that we think will be in the first phase of the May 2016 plan. We are not doing that on the basis of central Government dictating to them. We are talking to them about whether it works for them.
Q71 Stephen Phillips: How many authorities is that, by May 2016?
Neil Couling: By May 2016, I want to have settled the plan for 2016-17. That will be—
Q72 Stephen Phillips: Shall I ask my question again, Mr Couling? How many authorities are you talking to in whose area this is going to be rolled out by May 2016?
Neil Couling: By about the end of 2017, we will be—
Robert Devereux: Five is the answer. If you are asking about May ’16, we are doing five in May, and we have just announced them.
Q73 Stephen Phillips: Okay. You are doing five, and those are the ones you have just announced. How many local authorities are eventually going to be responsible for rolling out UCT on the digital service in the country?
Neil Couling: There are 381 local authorities across Great Britain.
Q74 Stephen Phillips: Right. And you have shared with the vast majority of them no plan at all—is this right?—about when they are going to be expected to deliver universal credit in their areas?
Robert Devereux: The vast majority of them have already opened universal credit in their area so they can begin to understand the service.
Chair: Mr Couling?
Neil Couling: I have just been through a spending review process that has set the budget for universal credit. The spending review process was settled a couple of weeks ago. As you heard from Mr Bowler, we have just got the outline business case signed off. It was signed off last week, and I am now starting detailed discussions with the local authorities with which we think we will be rolling out in 2016-17. I can’t have discussions with people before I’ve got the spending authority to enact those wishes. Local authorities have a lot of things to plan for, not just universal credit. I want to talk to them when I’ve got some certainty about this, and that is what I am doing now.
Q75 Stephen Phillips: We have now been through the spending review, so let’s get another milestone into the public record. By when will you have shared with every local authority in the country a detailed plan about when the digital service for universal credit will be rolled out in their area?
Neil Couling: Okay. There are two parts to this plan, as Mr Devereux explained to you earlier. In May 2016, we start rolling out for new cases across the whole of the country by jobcentre, which completes by June 2018. In 2018, we start migrating existing cases, which we complete by March 2021.
Robert Devereux: Let me try to answer this. He has already told you that just after Christmas we will give you the plan for May ’16 through to the back end of ’16-17.
Q76 Stephen Phillips: How many authorities are going to be in that plan?
Robert Devereux: I am trying to do the sums quickly. It is going to be eight or nine months of five, plus a couple of 50.
Neil Couling: I would think about 100 local authorities.
Robert Devereux: About 100, and then we will have the remaining to do in the following year. If you imagine that we make a plan now, and keep updating and extending it—
Q77 Stephen Phillips: So early in the new year, let us say 150 local authority areas. At some point thereafter—and I would like to know when—there is the plan for the remainder. When is “at some point thereafter” for the remainder?
Robert Devereux: The whole point of doing five a month in the first period of ’16 is to check that it works properly. There is no point in my telling the last authority for sure that they are definitely going in May ’18 if I don’t actually know that.
Q78 Stephen Phillips: I understand that, Mr Devereux. They are a best guess of when everybody else is going to be subject to a plan.
Robert Devereux: My working assumption is it would be towards the back end of ’16. At the point at which we are committing ourselves to do 50 a month, we will have to be pretty confident that that is going to work; at which point you can plausibly imagine we can do the maths and talk to people.
Q79 Stephen Phillips: When will the twin-track approach come to an end—digital service and live service? When is it finally going to be all digital service?
Neil Couling: As part of the roll-out of the digital service, as we roll out in that location, we will end the live service and move people from the live service over to the new full service.
Q80 Stephen Phillips: I know that; all I want is a date. You can say—it is certainly acceptable for you to say—“I don’t know”.
Neil Couling: I do know.
Stephen Phillips: Well, tell me what the answer is then.
Neil Couling: I was just trying to explain the process to you. The date varies by location. The final cases on the live service we expect to be finished three months after June ’18, so in October ’18 the live service will be finished there. We are, as I said, “test and learn”. In Hounslow, which is one of the offices that we announced today, we will be going with “make scalable”; we are going to test this process and see whether that three-month assumption is a correct one to make, to put into our plan.
Chair: I have to say, this is the sort of transparency we want. You have got a target, but you are going to be testing it. We understand that needs to be happening. That is the kind of answer we need in this hearing, so that we can begin to discuss with you and hold it to account. That is why you are in front of us. So thank you for that.
Q81 Stephen Phillips: Mr Couling, if you want to respond to that, then do.
Neil Couling: I was just going to say, I think this is what Mr Devereux was saying: at what level and what depth does it make sense—
Stephen Phillips: Something by reference to which we can measure something, is the answer to that. At the moment, there is nothing by reference to which we can measure things.
Neil Couling: I track and measure this programme against hundreds of different check points, and so forth. I could put all those into the public domain, I suppose, but I do not think it would help the Committee.
Q82 Stephen Phillips: It would help if you put the major ones in. For example, if you look at the OBR chart, there are numbers in there for numbers of claimants by certain dates. You could have that information as to what your estimate is in the public domain.
Neil Couling: The OBR charts are built on the ones we have given them; but you have to be really careful with this, because the fluctuations in the economy drive big changes in those numbers. So if you are going to try to judge success or failure as hitting a particular number, I am never going to be successful because they are a point-in-time estimate.
Q83 Stephen Phillips: What that really amounts to, and I will tell you how it looks from this side of the table, Mr Couling, is “I don’t want to put them in the public domain because I don’t want to be hauled in front of the Public Accounts Committee for not meeting them.”
Robert Devereux: We were coming anyway, weren’t we? Let’s be clear. I am here for the third time now. I am expecting to keep coming. I do take the point. You are asking us to be slightly clearer about when we are going to be saying things. We are quite consciously saying to you: I am not about to put out the best guess of the entire shooting match, because I simply do not have a best guess that is worth the paper it is written on. I can tell you the big milestones, which I have told you. I can meet you halfway.
Q84 Stephen Phillips: Mr Devereux, I understand all that. Can I have your undertaking, perhaps, that you and Mr Couling, and those who come under you, will have a discussion with the NAO as to useful milestones which might be set, by reference to which this Committee, Parliament and the taxpayer can measure whether this programme is doing well, and whether it is on track?
Robert Devereux: I am very happy to have that conversation.
Q85 Caroline Flint: I will come in on the back of that point, because, Mr Couling, you said in your own words that fluctuations in the wider economy have an impact, and what is happening to birth rates—you name it. The Committee, in complex areas, is trying to understand what beneficial changes in terms of people going to work and staying in work can be directly linked to the change in the system to universal credit, and what might have happened anyway because the wider economy was just making changes; because this programme is costing a huge amount of money. It is costing a lot more, from what I can understand, than was originally expected.
Robert Devereux: It is costing less than it said.
Caroline Flint: Also, it is taking a lot longer, because the chart I have looked at, which is looking at where we should be for 2015—we should have been at 5 million-plus, in terms of numbers, under a universal credit system, whereas we are down at 140,000. It is how we extrapolate. This is also obviously the job of the Treasury, too, Mr Bowler, in signing off these business cases, about how much you can pinpoint to the decision made to change from one system to another, and the costs involved in that.
Neil Couling: There are two things I would say back to that. First, I was just cautioning the Committee not to hang too many hats on case load numbers, because they do vary. You have been an Employment Minister, so you know how shifts in the economy can very quickly change the numbers of people on benefits and not on benefits.
Secondly, for the analysis that we published yesterday, we compared an exact same like sample of people on JSA with people on universal credit, for exactly the reasons that you suggested—how do you strip out the possibility that it could just be the wider economy driving the change? That is exactly why we adopted the approach, signed off by NISSA, in that analysis. I agree entirely, which is why I have so many people working on evaluating this, because the business case benefits are exceptionally strong: £1.7 billion of investment for £3 billion of labour market savings a year. That is a huge return and we have to deliver that.
Q86 Stephen Phillips: Could you help me with a few things, briefly? How much will have been spent on outside consultants—such as IBM, Accenture, Hewlett-Packard and others—by the time the digital service goes live?
Neil Couling: We are not using outside consultants on the digital service. It is being built in-house by civil servants and people we have recruited.
Q87 Stephen Phillips: So that is no money at all on consultants for the digital service?
Robert Devereux: We have some people who are interim employees.
Q88 Stephen Phillips: In other words, you are paying their employers and they are in the Department, is that right?
Robert Devereux: We have not let a contract to IBM or Accenture to build this for us; we have gone to some companies to get actual manpower to work for us because we have not recruited them as actual civil servants. But they are working under my managers.
Q89 Stephen Phillips: I would like a note on how much you are spending on the employment costs for those staff from the companies I mentioned or, indeed, any outside company.
Robert Devereux: You’re welcome. We can do that.
Q90 Stephen Phillips: Okay. We have had this twin-track approach that the Committee said previously was probably the sensible way forward. How much will the IT write-off amount to once the live system has gone and we are stuck with the digital system?
Robert Devereux: We made an adjustment to the accounts in 2012-13, which we inquired about at the time. We are not planning any further ones.
Q91 Stephen Phillips: So there will be no further write-offs of IT to move to the digital service.
Robert Devereux: No. Let me be very clear about what that means: we are using an asset, which the NAO has certified has the right value on the balance sheet in each of the last three years of accounts. It is being depreciated through use, which is exactly what you do with an asset. It is not a write-off.
Q92 Caroline Flint: I have a couple of quick questions about payments being made for rent, which has always been a particularly difficult issue. I remember the last Labour Government moving towards encouraging tenants to be more responsible for paying their housing payments and the difficulties at that time relating to landlords perhaps not receiving the money and other problems. Going back to the paper you published on Sunday, I noticed that its findings from extended gateway claimants relating to housing costs were that around a quarter—26%—were not confident with monthly budgeting, increasing to 40% for those with complex claims including housing costs, and some increases in arrears. Will you say some more about what you have done to address landlord’s concerns? In some cases tenants have got themselves into really difficult situations. I understand that some landlords associations have threatened that they may not want even to consider tenants who are in receipt of universal credit.
Neil Couling: You will know that when we made the changes in the private rented sector in 2008 we had the facility to take back control and pay rent direct to landlords. That is happening in around 20% of cases in the private rented sector now.
Q93 Caroline Flint: Is that for everyone?
Neil Couling: That is everybody—that’s within housing benefit, okay? Universal credit extends the responsibility to pay your own rent into the social rented sector—it takes in the same rules as apply to the private rented sector. You are right that it has raised anxieties from landlords about whether they will get their rent paid. We have what we call APAs—alternative payment arrangements—where we do what we did for the 2008 changes, which is to take back responsibility for paying the landlord directly. What we have also done is a new process with social landlords called “trusted partners” where we ask them to identify the people who would struggle with taking responsibility for their own rent at the point that they come on to universal credit. The landlords themselves identify the people who should have their rent paid direct by the DWP.
Q94 Caroline Flint: That’s really helpful. If I heard correctly, you are saying that around 20% of claimants, where housing costs involve housing benefit, under the present system have to go back to an alternative payment method to ensure that a landlord gets the rent.
Neil Couling: Yes.
Q95 Caroline Flint: Okay. Are you saying that that would still be around 20% under universal credit? Do you have any forecasts for whether that would go up or down?
Neil Couling: In the private rented sector, we assume the same level of alternative payment arrangements. For the social rented sector, we assume that it will be a higher figure. Before the Work and Pensions Committee in 2010, I gave an estimate off the top of my head of around a third, and I think would stick with that assessment here.
Now, our policy is to try to work with people to see whether they can, after a period of having their rent paid direct by the state, take responsibility. Why do we do that? Because we know that having your rent paid by the state and then going into work and not having your rent paid by the state is a cause of arrears and also acts as a barrier to work. We want to see whether we can work that number down, but my working assumption inside the business case is for about a third of cases.
Q96 Caroline Flint: If I have heard that correctly—the acoustics in this room are awful—for the private rented sector the proportion of people on universal credit as we move to that system will be roughly the same as present, which is 20% on alternative payment arrangements, but it could go up for those in social housing to about a third. So universal credit is not having a—
Witnesses: No.
Chair: Could you just speak up nice and loud?
Neil Couling: I will try. The reason for the assumption is that those who are allocated social housing tend to have more vulnerable characteristics, so we have increased the assumption in the social rented sector when compared with the private rented sector. We have worked with landlords in the social rented sector on all this, and the “trusted partners” approach has come out of that work. It is about how we can make this system work both for tenants and for landlords.
Q97 Caroline Flint: Perhaps it would be helpful if you could write to us about that, because the figures from your own report show that about a quarter are not confident with their monthly budgeting, which increases to 40% for those with complex needs.
Neil Couling: A quarter to a third—I said a third. You can then go and look at a subset of that, for whom the figure is 40%. That is broadly in line with my assumptions, and I aimed off a bit in the Committee in 2010 for precisely the reason that we do not know until we have done the work and have worked it through.
Q98 Chair: Research like that is generally helpful to us in doing our work. Going back to Mr Phillips’s points, it is about having some transparency, aside from research data, about what your projections are going to be, so that we can measure that against the research, as you’re doing. I don’t think that there should be anything to hide; this is taxpayer money and hopefully the taxpayer will benefit.
Robert Devereux: I was going to make the point that my colleague has said that he has made a planning assumption to ensure that he has enough money and people in the system to do it. The policy is to try to encourage people to be sufficiently capable of managing their own budget so that they don’t need anything at all. I just wanted to make that distinction. I am making sure that I have enough provision, but the Government—
Q99 Chair: A number of us will recall questions in the House in the very early stages of this to the same Secretary of State, because he has been there such a long time, about workarounds for those who would struggle—[Interruption.] There is a vote. If we can wait for a couple of minutes, I want to ask Mr Devereux—I did alert him—about the flexible support fund and how it is being used in some jobcentres. There was a particular issue in a jobcentre when some staff were found to have used it to pay people who were suspended from benefits. I understand that an investigation has been undertaken by the Minister. I don’t know whether you can give us any update on where that is.
Neil Couling: I was running jobcentres at the time, so I remember the case very well. A claimant alleged that the flexible support fund had been used to engineer her off benefits and to claim a JSA off-flow. We did an independent investigation and found that that was the case and two members of staff were sacked. Then one of the members of staff and another member of staff alleged that it was management malpractice. We have done two investigations into that and found that there is no evidence to answer. The claimants themselves—the people who were dismissed—took themselves to a tribunal, which said that the claimants’ lack of credibility and inconsistencies with—
Q100 Chair: Is it at least possible for the local MP, who is a Privy Counsellor, to see that investigation?
Neil Couling: I have met the local MP to talk about this and two employment Ministers, both the previous one and this one. It is not our normal practice to make those investigations apparent, because there are issues of confidentiality around the people who were investigated when no case was found against them.
Q101 Chair: Okay. We’re going to have to go, but I think there is concern that this may have been more widespread than you think, as you know from the MP concerned.
Neil Couling: There is no evidence to suggest that.
Chair: He and I will continue to raise it. Thank you for what you have said on the record. It is very helpful. I am afraid that we will have to adjourn while we vote. Thank you very much indeed.
Sitting suspended for a Division in the House.
Oral evidence: Universal Credit: Recall, HC 601 28