Even 'Duracell bunny' McVey lacks energy to defend universal credit

I have a dream. It is 12 years in the future and neither Iain Duncan Smith nor Esther McVey have been able to find another job after losing their seats in the general election of 2021. They are to be found scavenging from bins or queueing at food banks after their universal credit payments have been delayed for six years. We can always hope.

A week later than planned – nothing to do with UC ever runs to time – McVey, the work and pensions secretary, came to the Commons to explain why the National Audit Office (NAO) had completely rubbished the work of her department. On these occasions, she resembles a Duracell bunny on a remedial reading course. Head down, racing through her statement at double-quick time, studiously ignoring inconvenient truths.

She began by insisting UC was leading-edge British technology that promoted agile working practices for disabled people. “France, Sweden and New Zealand have all come over to this country to see how our system works,” she said. So they can learn what not to do and design theirs completely differently.

After forgetting that the only reason the UC phone helplines are now free is because the government was shamed into not charging by the opposition, McVey finally got round to the NAO report. Basically the whole thing was a load of tosh put together by a bunch of idiots who hadn’t got a clue what they were doing. If the NAO had done its job properly, it would have realised that the DWP had completely revolutionised its systems in the 10 minutes since the report had been written and that everything was now just perfect.

The shadow work and pensions secretary, Margaret Greenwood, is not the most dynamic of politicians – she has yet to find a room that she cannot put to sleep – but even she can take advantage of an open goal when she sees it. All that was required was to mention a few of the more obvious failings listed in the NAO report, and she duly obliged. The rollout for UC had been put back a year for the sixth time. Four legal challenges had been upheld. Forty per cent of claimants are not even able to verify their own names on the system. Twenty-five per cent of carers and two-thirds of all disabled people had not been paid on time. Answer that.

Now forced to wing it without a script, the Duracell bunny started manically spinning round and round in circles. “I’ve visited groups up and down the country and I’m doing the best I can,” McVey said, sounding rather more desperate than she intended.

The opposition should stop moaning. Rather than going on about the two-thirds of disabled people who were being slowly starved to death, Labour ought to be congratulating the Department for Work and Pensions for getting money to the one third on time. Time to stop talking the country down and concentrate on the positives.

Duncan Smith, the former DWP secretary who had been the brains – for want of a better word – behind UC, inevitably intervened to agree with McVey that the NAO report was “a shoddy piece of work”. The NAO might just as well have used those same words to describe IDS. And with far more reason and greater accuracy. After all, auditing is what the NAO is paid to do.

“I’ve spoken to Darren from Wales,” McVey said. And he had assured her that everything to do with UC was running perfectly. It didn’t seem to have occurred to her that if she was resorting to individual reports from random people who had got a bit lucky, then she had probably lost the argument.

Labour’s Ruth George observed that even the DWP’s own reports proved UC was not working, with more than 40% of claimants in hardship after nine months of payments. McVey snorted. Who could believe a word an expert said? Especially one from her own department.