It is right to ask whether the Welfare Secretary should resign. But we shouldn't allow parliamentary drama to distract us from the real problem with the scheme
by Maya Goodfellow / July 5, 2018 / Leave a comment
Esther McVey as Whitehall’s spending watchdog, the National Audit Office, has written to the Work and Pensions Secretary to complain of inaccuracies in her statement to Parliament on Universal Credit. Photo: PA
An apology and, sometimes, a resignation: these are the two things we’ve come to expect when a minister’s mistake is publicly exposed. That was what former Home Secretary Amber Rudd did in April when she admitted she had “inadvertently misled” MPs over targets for undocumented migrants. Yesterday Secretary of State for Work and Pensions Esther McVey had to issue this same apology over a statement she had made on universal credit.
But in both cases there’s a much bigger problem behind the specific blunder. In Rudd’s, it was the Windrush affair and the appalling way migrants are treated in Britain. In McVey’s, it is universal credit itself.
McVey had to apologise after she claimed the National Audit Office (NAO)—the independent body that scrutinises public spending for Parliament—said in a report Universal Credit was working and that they were concerned it was being implemented too slowly.
In reality, the NAO report was anything but positive. It found Universal Credit is “not value for money now, and that its future value for money is unproven”; that the government’s own claim that it will boost employment is unlikely to be provable any time soon; and said that, contrary to McVey’s claims, there should be a pause in reforms.
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