Social Security (Additional Payments) Bill — House of Commons, 2022-06-22
Topic: Social Welfare
Stephen Creswell Timms (Labour, Centre-left): That would help—just modernising the old systems would help, and I will say something about that in a moment We are getting ad hoc payments from the Treasury to tide us over. The Secretary of State rightly spelled out to the Committee the downsides of one-off ad hoc payments such as those that the Bill enables. In oral evidence in February last year, she told the Committee that there were higher risks of fraud attached to one-off payments and that they can make it difficult for claimants to budget effectively—both quite telling points. She said that one-off payments were not "one of the Department’s preferred approaches" for providing that financial support. She noted: "There are some challenges about fraud" and that there would be difficulties if people claiming tax credits received a one-off payment and then moved to universal credit shortly afterwards. On the question of what might work best for claimants, she told us: "Previous experience would be that a steady sum of money would probably be more beneficial to claimants and customers, to help with that budgeting process." I think she is right; it is not ideal for the Treasury to provide lump sums instead Why was proper uprating not done in this case? The Chancellor pointed out that legacy benefits cannot be quickly uprated because they are run on antiquated IT systems, as the right hon. Member for Preseli Pembrokeshire (Stephen Crabb) referred to, so uprating takes several months. The Chancellor told us that that was why he was unwilling simply to uprate benefits: it could have been done quickly for universal credit, as we discovered in the pandemic, but not for legacy benefits In an earlier debate, I recall the shadow Secretary of State, my right hon. Friend the Member for Leicester South (Jonathan Ashworth) brandishing a document from an IT company, perhaps Oracle, about the front end that it had built for the Department’s legacy systems, which it said enabled changes to be made to them more quickly. I wonder whether the Minister, in closing, could tell us the truth behind that claim about the front end that had been provided. I know that the Department has certainly commissioned such front ends for the legacy systems over a long time, so I am interested to know why, notwithstanding what that brandished document said, it is apparently still the case that uprating takes four or five months. Are front ends in place? Why have they apparently not made faster changes possible In our June 2020 report on the Department’s response to coronavirus, the Select Committee recommended an increase in the speed with which changes could be made to legacy benefits. We said: "People will be claiming legacy benefits until at least September 2024, the Government’s most recent estimate for completing the rollout of Universal Credit. It is simply not tenable for the Department to continue to operate antiquated systems that prevent Ministers from making timely changes to the rates at which legacy benefits are paid. We recommend that the Department work to increase the speed with which changes can be made to legacy benefit rates." In its response in September that year, the Department said that it "recognises the need to be able to respond to events flexibly which is why we are investing in Universal Credit which is more agile than the systems that support legacy benefits." While substantial numbers of people depend on legacy benefits, the Government surely need to keep the systems that support those benefits fit for purpose. They are clearly not fit for purpose at the moment, and that ought to be addressed.