How bad is the Tory Universal Credit disaster?

There are so many problems with the Tory government's botched Universal Credit policy it's impossible to list them all, but here are just a few:

• There's a demonstrable link between Universal Credit being imposed on an area and rising rates of poverty and food bank dependency. The Trussell Trust has reported that Food Bank usage has soared 52% in Universal Credit areas, while the Joseph Rowntree Foundation have highlighted the way that Universal Credit has tipped struggling families into absolute destitution (the 42 day wait from initial claim to first payment being one of the worst aspects).

• Despite the 42 day wait a shocking one in six of the unfortunate people who have been subjected to the Tory Universal Credit experiment were still not even paid in time. Imagine if the business you were involved in had a 1/6 failure rate. There'd be hell to pay.

• There's the fact that Universal Credit discriminates heavily against the self-employed (especially seasonal workers and self-employed people with fluctuating monthly earnings), This means extreme income losses for self-employed people who are transferred to Universal Credit. That's some 5 million self-employed people in the UK at risk of impoverishment if this flawed Tory scheme is ever rolled out nationally.

• Another flaw in Universal Credit means that some people would actually be financially penalised for working extra hours. Research by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation found that some people would actually end up with less disposable income if they changed from working 3 days a week to 5. What kind of incompetent government economically punishes people for working longer hours?

• The way Universal Credit is paid out per household creates a very strong risk of domestic violence perpetrators taking control of the entire family budget. One victim told a committee of MPs that her husband would "wake up one morning with £1,500 in his account and piss off with it, leaving us with nothing for weeks". Shockingly the Tories have continued pushing ahead with the scheme despite these warnings, doing nothing but issuing an Orwellian statement that they take tackling domestic violence "incredibly seriously" as they simultaneously turn a deliberate blind eye to the devastating consequences of their own policy.

• Universal Credit is so badly flawed that it economically penalises parents for getting new jobs, forcing them hundreds of pounds into debt because the system won't take account of their childcare costs. Just imagine the combination of incompetence and outright malice that drives Tory ministers to continue rolling out a scheme that penalises people for finding work.

• A National Audit Office report into the early stages of Universal Credit found that £34 million had already been wasted on botched IT systems. In 2014 the amount wasted on botched Universal Credit IT systems was upped to £500 million+ by the Public Accounts Committee.

• A leaked 2013 report described the absolute chaos in the Universal Credit team. One respondent said that there was "a near complete absence of anything that looks like strategic leadership in the programme", and another said "I have never worked somewhere where decision making was so apparently poor at senior levels. This programme should be a case study for how not to engage with your people to get the most out of them".

• David Cameron had such a lax attitude to incompetence amongst his ministers that he simply ignored the hundreds of millions in scrapped IT projects and the reported administrative chaos at the DWP, allowing Iain Duncan Smith to continue as the minister responsible for the chaos until he resigned over Brexit in 2016.

• There's the fact that it's ridiculously delayed. The entire country was supposed to have been converted to Universal Credit by October 2017, but instead just 815,000 people in a few unfortunate areas had been subjected to it by March 2018.

• In 2017 Labour Party and other opposition MPs voted for a "pause" in the roll-out of Universal Credit to deal with some of the most glaring flaws. The vote was won by 299 votes to 0 after the government deliberately abstained on the vote, but the Tories have carried on with the roll-out regardless.

• In 2017 the Tories quietly shelved plans to roll out the full version of Universal Credit in the areas of several senior Tory MPs (Iain Duncan Smith, David Gauke, Damian Green, and Theresa May), including two of the DWP ministers who were responsible for devising and implementing the scheme in the first place. Cancelling the roll-out of Universal Credit in their own constituencies as they force it on Labour and SNP areas is a very clear implicit admission that they know Universal Credit is utterly flawed and devastatingly unpopular.

• In July 2018 the Tory DWP minister Esther McVey outright lied to parliament about the botched roll-out of Universal Credit, claiming that a damning National Audit Office report didn't take account of changes to the system when it actually did. Theresa may refused to sack her despite this egregious breach of parliamentary standards.

• There's the fact that the Tories repeatedly lied and misled to pretend that Universal Credit isn't making people worse off, before Esther McVey finally admitted the truth that people would be worse off under the scheme she's imposing just one day after Theresa May had lied to the public that nobody would lose out.

• The former Tory Prime Minister John Major attacked the scheme, saying that Univeral Credit has the potential to be as disastrous for the current Tory government as Poll Tax was for Margaret Thatcher!

• Fury amongst the Tory MPs has been further exacerbated by a Residential Landlords Association report showing a massive increase in landlords with Universal Credit tenants in rent arrears. A rise from 27% in 2016 to 61% in 2018. The immense suffering of the working poor under this botched scheme was never likely to factor into Tory MP's concerns, but ever growing numbers of wealthy Tory-voting landlords losing cash to the scheme is much more likely to grab their attention.

Despite all of these problems the Tory government continue pushing on regardless. They don't care that the scheme is pushing people into poverty and Food Bank dependency; they don't care that it's an absolute gift to controlling domestic violence perpetrators; they don't care that it penalises self-employed people and entrepreneurs; they don't care that they've wasted over £500 million of public cash on this botched scheme; they don't care that it actually creates various disincentives to work; they don't care that it's years behind target; they don't care that parliament voted for them to stop and iron out some of the worst faults; and they don't care that Theresa May outright lied to the nation when she said people wouldn't be worse off just one day before the minister in charge of it admitted that they would be.

The only real hope that the Tories will stop pushing this malicious and incompetent farce is if they start getting stick from the wealthy Tory-voting landlord class who find that Universal Credit is impoverishing their tenants so much that they can't afford to pay the rent.

If the Tories won't listen to the interests of the rich, then who will they listen to?

The other option of course is a Labour government. Whether they'd "pause" the Universal Credit roll-out in order to try and fix all of the Tory flaws, or scrap it altogether is a question that will be answered by the next Labour manifesto.

Whatever the case, anyone who votes Tory in light of this absolute farce is complicit in the waste, the inefficiency, the dishonesty, the poverty, and the suffering.

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