However Iain Duncan Smith spins it, it seems clear that universal credit is a policy in trouble. What should future Labour ministers learn from this experience?
IDS won some respect for thinking deeply about welfare reform while still in opposition. He set up the Centre for Social Justice which produced interesting ideas on early years intervention, tackling gangs, helping with debt and work with offenders as well as the proposals for welfare reform centred around universal credit. The idea gained cross-party support, although those who had experience of implementing and funding reform in welfare rightly counselled that it would be difficult to get the Treasury to pay for it, to get the IT to work it, and that it would need extensive trialling and piloting.
However, with the energy of a new secretary of state in a newly formed government, IDS declared universal credit as his top priority and sneered at those who questioned the deliverability as unwilling to support reform.
So what went wrong?
First, I find it frankly amazing that there seems to have been so little progress-chasing by ministers of the department’s top priority. This morning, the BBC’s Nick Robinson likened universal credit to the Child Support Agency or NHS IT systems as examples of how big projects often go wrong. However, neither of those were the secretary of state’s top priority. They weren’t the mainstay policy of one of the government’s top reforms.
When I first became a junior education minister in 1999, Estelle Morris tracked the delivery of literacy and numeracy on a weekly basis. David Blunkett returned from Sheffield every week with a dictated memo of action for officials based on the progress (or lack of it) he’d seen in his constituency. In 2000-1, Alan Milburn summoned ministers and officials weekly to plan how to get the NHS through the winter. In 2006 when I went back to education, Andrew Adonis knew the stage that every single new academy was at. When I was home secretary, I had fortnightly meetings to track how we were doing in delivering a neighbourhood policing team to every area of the country.
Ministers need to set strategic direction, but they also need to assure themselves that key policies are being delivered. IDS has failed to do this.
Responsibility cannot be shuffled off to civil servants as IDS and his aides have so clearly tried to do. There appears to have been a civil service failure to plan and project-manage properly. However, briefing and counterbriefing won’t solve the immediate problem – and it will certainly destroy the close and trusting working relationship between ministers and civil servants which, in my experience, is always necessary to deliver reform and make it stick.
Then this week IDS seems to have gone from one extreme to the other. His Today interview was a flurry of the worst sort of bureaucrat-speak – ‘prioritise; pathfinder; roll out the fully enhanced digital offering blah blah’. There is a happy medium between floating so high in the policy atmosphere that you can’t see what’s happening on the ground and turning into a speaking project plan.
And at another point, he described the new official in charge of delivery as ‘the leader’ of universal credit. No, Iain! You’re the leader – you’ve just failed to lead properly so far. Labour shadow ministers – look and learn. Rachel Reeves’ offer of cross-party support to sort out the mess and her suggestion that Labour is already setting up a ‘taskforce’ to rescue the policy when we’re in government are canny moves.
Labour shadow teams are rightly focusing on the key policies and messages for the next manifesto. Winning is the first task. However, as IDS has demonstrated, there’s no pause for thought between winning and governing.
So, as you are determining the policy, give a bit of thought to how you’ll make it happen when you get the chance. And when you get into office, trust your civil servants, but don’t assume you can hand over responsibility. That’s why government is hard, relentless work. Planning and thinking in advance makes it manageable and, most importantly, successful.
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Jacqui Smith is a former home secretary, writes the Monday Politics column for Progress, and tweets @smithjj62
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Great analysis to which I would add – UC is yet another classic example of a major change programme being run as an IT project, so the focus is on systems and processes rather than people, i.e. the staff delivering the service on the frontline have hardly been involved and the citizen who are meant to use it are not part of this ‘redesign’ either yet they know far more about the service than the senior officials and Spads in Whitehall……so another example of an ‘IT disaster’ but even worse – a ‘new service’ designed without input from those using it or delivering it. Even more worry is that IDS has admitted the waste of public money £40m on IT but actually a lot more given hours officials and consultants put into this (including those officials who have ‘retired’ i.e. paid off’) so may be worth so more digging to show how much public money wasted.
And what about the funding for this massive change? Was this properly allocated? It is typical of right-wing governments to promise all kinds of reforms and not allocate enough funds to carry them out.
In the United Kingdom a decision to mobilise troops to War [any enemy] requires cross-party support? That should be the case as UK is not [yet] under **Trotskyite diktat.[?]. Creating jobs out of thin air is always difficult, with or without expensive software programmes; and finding suitable work, for fit & healthy citizens, should be the priority of any DWP [RSM]Chief of Staff and his many foot soldiers @Whitehall SW1A. Playing down the IT/computer problems is smoke&mirrors and so much hogwash £40+mill is a Dept snafu & signal failure of great & **dramatic proportions. Liveable wages are paid to Service personnel in the armed forces. Personnel receive free digs and grub[accommodations and sustenance allowances]. A non-uniformed, ordinary citizen in civvie street is supposed to stack shelves/or sign on daily at a dole office and spend 8hrs twiddling their thumbs at a jobcentre class, whilst still looking for a job of work, This is compulsory for anyone wishing to receive their Insurance benefit payments [dole money/giro]. This reeks a wee bit of ‘Human Rights” abuses, Rabbie? Little wonder the current Tory lot want ECHR out of the way, they hamper their battlefield plan to get the rabble into any work at any cost. And if citizens do manage to find work its 35 hrs a week on minimum wage which wouldn’t pay for a dogs’food let alone an inner-London digs/rent. Being in gaol is an option many citizens have chosen rather than begging and sleeping under a bridge at night – a lot of these guys are ex- Army bods, ask any British Legion Major. At least in Gaol a man can at least eat for free and have a roof over their head and a shower. The wardens aren’t the problem its the inmates who operate from the inside – they have no problem finding work for idle hands. Staggering statistics – why doesn’t that Irish investigative journo’ go undercover at Wandsworth to find out how it all works inside a prison? That would be worth watching. I’d give him 24hrs before he’s rumbled. [Any takers @5-1?]
Whoever or whichever political party is next ico DWP/Jobcentre strategies and the regular think-tank soirees up Westminster way @HP Bubble Terraced Smoking Cuban Monte Cristo Habanas Only Bars, should treat the “WORK-fair” programme as the UK being at WAR against the rest of the commercial world.China is doing so well, Trade Surpluses[true], quality merchandise [Godhelp ass] and a very happy workforce[my ass] ; maybe iDS should take on some of their tactics for winning this commercial WAR – SLAVE LABOUR options are always on the table [whoops!- oh, sorry! I’ve just been told iDS uses them already!! @ TESCOs] The ‘soldiers’ are the workforce, FEED THEM as an army marches on its stomach, even iDS knows the value of that one. And show citizens same respect, as you would if he or she were in uniform.
We are all citizens.
PS, The ‘fatlady’ hasn’t yet sung, so let’s not us{LABOUR] get too cocky; I am very superstitious on counting one’s chickens before they are hatched. And its not mannerly to laugh/guffaw in defeated opponent’s face.[2nd thorts-, okay in this case guffaw all you like]..