Universal Credit: After Eight Years It Still Causes Misery

The latest concessions from the Work and Pensions Secretary to reduce the hardship of Universal Credit on the most vulnerable and needy is very welcome, but it cannot gloss over the fact that this a complicated and confusing benefit which will never work properly in practice. It may be clever, it may be intellectually elegant and it could even be brilliant in theory. But the nature of people in crisis, many of whom have various limitations of access and understanding, added to the administrative limitations of the public service machine, as we see time and again, means that it is not workable in the universal application for which it was designed.

Labour have promised to close it down. Since they are not in power but the Tories are, it falls to the government to eat humble pie put a stop to a flagship which after eight years, is still not fit to put to sea. Meanwhile the outrage of  dependency on food banks, a dependency which rockets in areas where U.C. is rolled out, is a shocking commentary upon the inequalities which lie behind rising public anger, of which Brexit and the trouble it is causing, is the most obvious, but not the only, symptom.