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Esther McVey isn’t the problem with Universal Credit—however badly she misled parliament

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

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…

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Maya Goodfellow

Maya Goodfellow is the author of “Hostile Environment: How Immigrants Became Scapegoats” (Verso)

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