Today we will urge the government to come clean about the impact of delays, chaos and failing programmes at the Department for Work and Pensions.
Today we will urge the government to come clean about the impact of delays, chaos and failing programmes at the Department for Work and Pensions
In February a constituent came to my surgery after her husband had suffered a stroke. She had given up work to look after him, they were getting behind on mortgage payments and couldn’t afford to get by.
They had tried to claim Personal Independence Payment (PIP) and Employment Support Allowance (ESA) but were forced to wait months for an ATOS assessment.
We referred the couple to a local food bank and pressed the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) to act quickly. But tragically her husband died in March without ever having had his ATOS appointment.
His wife is now ill and struggling to cope following her bereavement. She too has tried to claim Employment Support Allowance, but has come up against appalling delays and is still waiting for a decision about her claim.
Sadly there are thousands of people across the country who have done the right thing but are being failed when they need help the most because of the government’s chaos, delays and incompetence.
And Iain Duncan Smith’s failure to deliver an effective benefits system not only affects the lives of those like my constituent who needs, it undermines the prospect of a fair and affordable system for everyone because public money is wasted on crisis management and failing IT projects, rather than on supporting those who really need it.
That’s why Labour will demand Iain Duncan Smith gets a grip of his failng department in a debate we have called in parliament today. We are urging the government to take three simple steps to improve its handling of the benefit system.
First, we want the government to tell people like my constituent just how long they should expect to wait for a disability benefit assessment and to set a time limit to stop the unacceptable delays.
The government’s chaotic handling of disability benefits has caused huge distress for thousands of people and the cost of clearing up the mess threatens to cost taxpayers millions. Over 700,000 people are stuck in the backlog waiting for decisions about Work Capability Assessments which they need to claim Employment and Support Allowance (ESA).
And delays aren’t confined to Employment Support Allowance with thousands of people stuck in an enormous backlog for Personal Independence Payment assessments. This is causing huge uncertainty, stress and hardship for thousands of disabled people waiting for decisions on new claims.
And tragically, people have died waiting for assessments. At the current rate it will take over 40 years to clear the huge assessment backlog which ministers have allowed to build up.
So today Labour will urge the government to guarantee a time that disabled people will receive an assessment for PIP rather than leaving people waiting for month after month for a decision.
Second, the government must urgently get a grip on its chaotic Universal Credit programme, which is currently wasting millions of public money on failed IT. Chaos within the £12.8 billion programme has brought delivery of Universal Credit shuddering to a halt. Iain Duncan Smith promised one million people would be claiming Universal Credit by April 2014, but the latest figures show less than 6,000 people are receiving this new benefit.
David Cameron once said that sunlight ‘is the best disinfectant’, but this doesn’t seem to apply to the DWP. For months ministers have refused to publish important documents which will reveal problems with Universal Credit.
Last week an upper tribunal judge refused consent for the government to appeal a previous ruling that the government should comply with a freedom of information request to publish the risk register and other documentation relating to the delivery of Universal Credit.
If the government continues to refuse to be open and transparent about the failings which have left Universal Credit in crisis the problems will only get worse. That’s why we’re calling on the government to publish the risk register, and to call in the National Audit Office to conduct a full review of the programme, and help work out just what is going wrong.
Third, we’re calling for the government to be clear about just how much delays and waste at the DWP are costing, and how this will affect the government’s cap on spending. Since 2010 David Cameron’s government has spent £13 billion more than planned on social security because of their failure to deal with the causes of rising benefit bills from low pay to lack of housing.
In March 2014 the Office for Budget Responsibility in March 2014 found projected spending on Employment and Support Allowance alone had risen by £800 million since December and earlier this month the BBC reported the government was in danger of breaching it’s welfare cap because of these rising costs.
The cost of the government’s failure to control social security costs will fall on taxpayers. We believe it’s completely unacceptable that people who have worked hard and have paid in are threatened with a huge bill to pay for the government’s chaotic and incompetent handling of social security. Ministers have refused to reveal how rising costs will affect their spending plans.
Today we will urge the government to come clean with the public about the impact of their delays, chaos and failing programmes on the social security budget.
David Cameron cannot allow the chaos, delays and waste within the DWP to continue. The huge backlog of disability assessments, spiralling delays to Universal Credit and threats to the social security budget are causing huge distress and hardship for thousands of people and threaten to add hundreds of millions to the welfare budget.
The government must act now to end the appalling indignity which so many vulnerable people are experiencing when they most need our support.
Rachel Reeves MP is shadow secretary of state for work and pensions
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43 Responses to “David Cameron cannot allow the chaos at the DWP to continue”
LB
If you support socialism, then yes you are creating the mess.
It’s very simple. If you take money for people and spend it, then when it comes to paying people back the money and you don’t then its creating the mess. If you support that you have to take responsibility for it.
Now where you get an excuse is if you aren’t told about what is going on.
Hence the simple question.
How much does the state owe for its pensions? It has no capital because the money was spent. Pure socialism, not capitalism, because there is no capital.
So as a university student, are you not clever enough to realise what’s been done with the cash?
Fae Sidhe
Labour need to offer an ALTERNATIVE. That means, instead of promising to be “tougher than the Tories”, we need a Welfare State and an NHS, both working to help the vulnerable, whether old or ill or unemployed. Both were founded when the nation was heavily in debt after the Second World War; yet in spite of crushing debt, the post-war governments gave us both, and also full employment!
Anything less is a move away from a civilised society and a descent into barbarism.
What else would help this poor poor (intentional double use of the word “poor”) country of ours? Joined-up thinking is a good place to start:
1) Social cleansing of the poor from the London area means that people cannot afford to live in the area where, by independent figures, 70% of the available jobs are being created. I know that and I don’t even LIVE down there. Will people notice, when shops and businesses in central London have to close because they cannot get staff, as there is nowhere they can afford to live?
2) Michael Heseltine was the “champion of Liverpool”, after travelling up to look at the deprived areas after the 1980s riots. They got investment due to his patronage, but “The North” is a hell of a lot bigger than just Liverpool and jobs flat-lined all over the North, not just in one city. The South escaped the carnage at that time and are only just getting hit the way the North has been. One of the few employers in the North has been the State. Now getting hammered by cuts in that sector, with, according to the press last week, 1,000,000 jobs still to be culled, who is going to be left in work?
3) Tesco and other supermarket chains have posted plummeting profits.
Awww, what a shame.
Maybe it’s the fact that, (what with Workfare and zero hours contracts and jobs not paying anything near a living wage) people are HAVING to change their shopping habits. The fact that low-cost supermarkets are raking it in seems to suggest that is the case.
*High street shopping areas are becoming ghost towns. Well of course – people are not being paid a wage that will cover more than the basics. Disposable income is, for most people, a distant memory.
*Perhaps the Tories will not keep their reputation as friends of big business. After all, what happens to big business, when no-one can afford their goods and services?
Capitalism, unfettered, devours itself. It is the true parasite of society.
4) Most people in surveys are in favour of the railways and utilities being re-nationalised. The people in favour came from all sides of the political spectrum. Let’s admit it, finally: Privatisation HASN’T worked.
The arguments in favour of Privatisation boil down to one: The tricky subject of the state having to subsidise poor performers.
Well we STILL have to subsidise them; but with the annoying fact that dividends get creamed off before we get the service we as a nation are supposedly paying a subsidy for. That’s not even COUNTING the fact that any profits are NOT used to update the infrastructure. No, for that the companies extort extra money from the treasury AND hike our bills!
5) If Labour think they can get in by just appealing to the chattering classes in the South-East, they may find themselves getting a shock in 2015. People in “The North” are turning to UKIP in large numbers, as was seen in the Local and Euro elections, in May.
Why?
Because they regard Tories as “Blue Conservatives”, LibDems as “Yellow Conservatives” (you must admit, they have a point) and, unfortunately, many think of Labour as “Red Conservatives”. New Labour may or may not be dead, but most hanker for a socialist (RED) Labour Party.
They went for UKIP mainly because they are the only party that hasn’t shafted them. (Many haven’t realised that UKIP are “Purple Conservatives” yet)
We want and need a socialist government – we haven’t had one for 35 years. People look around and see jobs that need doing. There IS plenty of work to be found. What is utterly lacking are people willing to PAY for that work to be done – including our government.. Corporate Welfare and Tax breaks are especially galling, when those who benefit most from this government’s largesse also turn out to be the ones who are NOT paying the taxes they should. Tax avoidance and evasion is another insanity – it would, if the “loopholes” were closed, make “Austerity” completely unnecessary.
Ordinary people, I assure you, HAVE realised this.
The Policy review that is taking place should take these obvious policies and run with them. The current government has no mandate: it did NOT win the election. It’s policies are nothing more than a thinly-veiled asset-stripping the small amount of wealth that our country still owns. They are putting through a bill having it’s second reading which will result in a new “Enclosures Act” for our times: selling off publicly-owned land, in the disguise of making planning applications more streamlined. This after their new “Poor Law”, which has led to so many deaths. If TTIP is passed, we will also have NO DEFENSE from corporations insisting on GMOs, hostile takeovers, etc.
The LibDem Party has committed electoral suicide by propping up such damaging changes to our society. The LibDem Party Conference should book London as it’s venue for 2015 – I’m told they still have the old-fashioned phone boxes there.
It is said that the NHS will be lost forever if Labour loses the next election. If that happens, Labour will not be forgiven, that they allowed a clear shot at an open goal election to be missed by trying to chase people who were NEVER going to vote for them anyway! Surely someone in the party has noticed that when socialist announcements are made, Ed Milliband’s popularity skyrockets, while it drops after he has a “Red Conservative” policy announcement?
Kryten2k35
I study computer science, not economics.
For any kind of record, I’m a social democrat. I think died in the wool socialism, the removal of private property and profit, is insane.
However, I think it’s you who lack the capacity to understand. The will be no run on the pensions sector. 30 million people aren’t going to come of pension age tomorrow and demand their state funded pension. Do I think it’s deplorable that the government is moving the goalposts on state pensions, yes. Do I think the government should keep all National Insurance payments for pensions and pensions alone? No, because that’s not all NI covers.
And, please, the spending of state pension money is socialism? Please, tell me more about how the money was spent and how it is in hedgefunds and bonds? Are those Socialist tenets? I think not.
You think that, as a recipient of state benefits, that I’m part of this problem?
My partner works and I study full time at a University several miles away. I’m not eligible to work (in the eyes of the government) and even then it is not at all feasible for me to work alongside my studies, my duties as a father all the whilst allowing my partner to work as well. Something would have to give, and I decided that was working, since graduating and acquiring a graduates job benefits me more than quitting University to work (just because some pompous arsehole on the internet might sneer at me) and giving up my duties as a father is simply out of the question.
Wages are not in line with the living wage and the housing crisis means that private landlords are snapping up any property and charging inflated prices for rent (yay capitalism). This means that people like me and my partner, the working poor, are struggling to make ends meet. Is the housing crisis my fault? Is it something I’ve done? Is the living wage:minumum wage discrepancy my fault? Is it something I’ve done? No. It is not.
This country needed cash injections into the economy in 2010. The government did nothing. It lent banks more money in roder for them to lend more money to people and businesses (which caused the problems in the first place) whilst simultaneously telling them to keep a certain percentage of their books in reserve, both working against one and other. The idea was some ridiculous and bullshit idea of this money “trickling down” to the lower classes and boosting the economy. It did fuck all. It was swallowed whole and never seen again. But, of course, people like me are the problem with society?
What shouldn’t have been done was the staving of wages from the public sector and the destruction of the welfare state. Poor people don’t save money, they spend it. They life month to month on their pay cheques. It speaks sense, if you ask me, that giving poor people money would have a trickle up effect into the upper echolons of the British economy. You want to inject cash into the Economy? Give poor people more money. Let them service their debts, buy food and pay their rent. Cut money form bullshit projects like the High-Speed Rail (that’s cost over £1bn).
So, again, what a pile of shit.
Guest
Thanks for your policy statement.
Guest
Yes yes, you keep demanding that the workers be murdered so pensions are not paid, you loon. You keep stating there is no choice but dead people, ever.