OBR sceptical about DWP's claims about Universal Credit

a post by Johnathan Bradshaw (Emeritus Professor of Social Policy | University of York) for the CPAG blog

The roll-out of Universal Credit may be running five years later than planned, having wasted £40 million in botched IT, and been emasculated by austerity cuts since 2015, but its advocates in the DWP still argue that it is all going to be worthwhile in the end because its labour supply effects will get people into work and onto higher earnings. Sir Robert Devereux, the DWP Permanent Secretary, claimed this in a retirement interview: “the roll-out will see unemployment rates fall as disincentives are taken out of the system”. Esther McVey, the new Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, even seemed to claim that 3.1 million extra people were in work as a result of UC when at the time only 700,000 were on it.

The impact assessment for UC in 2012 estimated that between 100,000 and 300,000 people would enter work and between 1 million and 2.5 million more hours would be worked as a result of UC. A parliamentary question in 2017 reduced the entering work number to 150,000 and made no claim on extra hours. The DWP presented estimates of the impact of UC in reports published in 2015 (the initial report and an update) and a further update in 2017. The latter found that that UC claimants were 3 percentage points more likely to be in work after six months than matched jobseeker’s allowance claimants (56 per cent versus 53 per cent).

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There’s links to different reports and primary sources. The general feeling of the post is that Universal Credit is a mess (as if most of us did not know that already).

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