Universal credit is designed to blame the poor for their poverty | Giles Fraser: Loose canon

A short, neatly dressed woman knocks on the vicarage door at midday. I do not know her. She starts to talk, quickly, her words tripping over themselves as they pour out. But soon she stops and just stands there and cries.

“I was just about to go and rob Tesco,” she says, “but I stopped myself and came here instead.”

I have the emotional hide of a rhinoceros and am well able to recognise the practised look of desperation that is often adopted on the vicarage doorstep. But this was not some well-rehearsed suffering. This was a woman who was absolutely at the end of her tether. She was completely ashamed about what she had nearly done. My parish is included in one of the pilot areas for the rollout of universal credit. This woman has not received her benefits since August, she says. A friend had promised her a tenner for the week. But her friend had let her down. So she is living off nothing. And the most shocking thing about this story is how normal it all seemed. We have allowed it to become normalised.

I don’t give out money at the door. But we do have bags of food at the back of the church for precisely this purpose. After I loaded her up, I wandered over to Tesco and bought her some bread and milk. Two kids, she said. And no partner. I wouldn’t have been able to condemn her had she gone and robbed Tesco for food.

The government’s response to all this has been risible. “The evidence so far shows that those who go into universal credit are more likely to be working six months later than they would have been had they been on the legacy benefits,” says David Gauke, secretary of state for work and pensions and Tory MP for South West Hertfordshire. There are those who would characterise this as “workhousing” – that is, deliberately making life so intolerable for poor people that they are forced into doing absolutely anything to keep themselves off the streets.

I have a friend who sleeps in disused buildings with the rats and the foxes. He did some kitchen-portering, but says he was roughed up for working too fast and showing up the others. He stayed with the nuns for a bit. And now he has been offered a job handing out the Evening Standard in Wembley. He says he gets £22 for that. But it is £5.60 return on the tube. Or a three-and-a-half hour walk to get there, and the same again back. Even in his needy state, these economics are pretty unpersuasive. I find some money for him to sweep up the leaves around the church. But I can’t keep on doing this for him.

“L” also came knocking on my door, asking for help, and I had to send him away with nothing. I also had nothing for the guy who sometimes punches the garage wall in frustration if he leaves empty-handed. I am scared of him. But he is right to be angry.

I don’t know what evidence Gauke has about universal credit getting people into work, but round these parts the anecdotal evidence is mounting that it is having the opposite effect. Because of the delays in benefits coming through, people are telling themselves that it does not pay to take a job that might only last a few months. That’s because, when that job is over, they will have to return to the back of a very long queue and wait even longer for their benefits to kick back in. Far from encouraging people into work, the long (are they deliberate?) delays in people getting their benefits are actually putting people off taking a job in the first place.

The malevolence of the philosophy of universal credit is that it backs people into a corner. Take the fact that the housing allowance part of the benefit is to be paid directly to the tenant and not the landlord. This will inevitably mean agonising end-of-month choices about whether to pay the rent or buy the children their dinner. When people choose to buy their children food, they are going to be given patronising lectures about budgeting. This will inevitably be used to blame the poor for their poverty.

In places where it is being rolled out, universal credit is turning into a universal disaster.