Advertisement

Esther McVey admits ongoing problems with universal credit

Welfare secretary Esther McVey admitted that DWP ministers and officials needed to listen more when problems were reported.
Welfare secretary Esther McVey admitted that DWP ministers and officials needed to listen more when problems were reported. Photograph: Tolga Akmen/AFP/Getty Images

The welfare secretary Esther McVey has admitted there are continuing problems with the much-criticised universal credit system and signalled that further changes are in the pipeline.

She also said Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) ministers and officials needed to listen more carefully to claimants, campaigners and frontline workers when they reported problems and complaints.

The DWP was heavily criticised for its “culture of indifference” in a scathing report by a cross-party group of MPs on Wednesday, which accused it of refusing to accept expert advice and slowness to act when policy errors were identified.

In a speech to the Reform thinktank on Thursday, McVey said universal credit was adapting the welfare system to changing patterns of work and using the latest technology to create an agile service offering “tailor-made support”.

But in an almost unprecedented official admission that not all is going well with the benefit, which is six years behind schedule, she said changes were needed.

McVey added: “And where we need to put our hands up, admit things might not be be going right, we will do.”

The DWP needed to reach out to, and learn from, all organisations that could help officials design and implement a system that fully supported claimants, she said, such as the National Audit Office. . A highly critical report by the public spending watchdog into universal credit triggered a controversy that ended with McVey being accused of misleading parliament and facing calls to resign.

McVey said she was working on changes to universal credit including debt repayment, support for the self-employed and benefit payment cycles for working claimants, but gave no further details.

McVey said she had already made changes to the DWP’s position on a number of issues, including reinstating housing benefit for 18-21-year-olds, and exempting kinship carers – where a child lives with a relative or friend who is not their parent – from the two-child limit, although the latter followed a court decision that termed the policy “perverse and unlawful”.

On Wednesday, McVey ordered the DWP to abandon its legal defence of its position to time-limit the repayments it must make to at least 70,000 disabled and chronically ill disability employment and support allowance (ESA) benefit claimants, adding £150m to a repayments bill already estimated at £340m.

This came within hours of the publications of a critical report by the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) that savaged the DWP for its six-year failure to fix system errors in the transfer of claimants from incapacity benefit to ESA.

Tens of thousands of ESA claimants will receive back-payments of £5,000 -£20,000 as a result of what MPs have called a series of “avoidable” mistakes. The DWP was warned of the error as early as 2014, but failed to take action until 2017.