Clive Betts MP blog- Wed, 12 June 2013 ...The Treasury has been consistently sceptical about IDS’s welfare reform programme. ...
•DWP has already been forced to ditch three of the four proposed Universal Credit pathfinders because the IT systems – even for this limited application – are nowhere near ready.
•Insiders are now confirming that there is no chance of 1 million people receiving universal credit by April 2014, as IDS promised in November 2011.
•Applications for discretionary housing payments (DHP) in April, as a consequence of the bedroom tax, leapt from 5,700 last year to more than 25,000 this year and many more will claim when they find out about them. The budget for DHPs will shortly be exhausted, or so constrained that arrears will take a further leap.
•As the DHP budget runs out, there will be thousands of bad news stories about the impact on adults with disabilities and on children who are no longer able to stay with one parent, after relationship breakdown.
•The costs of collecting the bedroom tax, including managing arrears, could well take up most of the extra income.
•A housing association at the heart of the first direct payment pathfinder experienced a 29 per cent rise in people contacting its financial support team in the last year, and a 19% rise in the total amount of debt referred.
•Rent arrears in these pathfinders are already increasing dramatically. The reality is that ‘direct by default’ is already being carefully ditched. ...
Of course, if the government had really been serious about subsidising under-occupation, they would not have excluded pensioners from the scope of the bedroom tax. Not that I am advocating an expansion of the bedroom tax, rather the opposite.
Postscript 5/8/13 see also http://www.michaelmeacher.info/weblog/2013/08/everyone-including-dwp-staff-think-ids-universal-credit-is-a-disaster-heres-why/
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