Chris Deerin: Universal Credit was a good idea that came unstuck through incompetence

But IDS had managed to do something very few of his predecessors had: he had made welfare, the ugly sister of public policy, sexy. Universal Credit (UC) was one of the – then still relatively new – Coalition Government’s most radical, and therefore dangerous, policies. Exposing the innards of the benefits system is a bit like opening up one of those high-street junction boxes: inside is a spidery mess of tangled wires that very few can make any sense of.

So to take on a wholescale rewiring was what the minister’s palely stern civil servants might have described as a bold decision. To attempt to simplify the extraordinarily complex structures that had built up over decades and decades, as various administrations tinkered and tweaked and slashed and spent, at the same time as introducing a new theory of incentivisation, looked very like a future case study in failure.

As someone whose sympathies lean to the philosophical side of politics, I could claim no great understanding of the benefits system’s intricacies when I and a couple of colleagues entered IDS’s very Tory office, with its large paintings of imperial battle scenes. As he outlined with passion how UC would replace Jobseeker’s Allowance, the Employment and Support Allowance, Income Support, Working Tax Credit, Child Tax Credit and Housing Benefit, ran us through some of the technicalities and enthused about what a difference this streamlined new approach would make, I managed to hold on to the odd strand. The intention seemed, in its way, rather beautiful: to ensure that those moving from welfare to work found their benefit cash tapering off rather than simply stopping. Recipients would therefore be better off taking a job, even part-time, than languishing on the dole. It would simplify the process and, in helping more people to find work, would even over time substantially cut the welfare budget. It was a One Nation Tory policy that addressed the desire of the Right that people not be allowed to loiter on benefits unnecessarily, and the insistence of the Left that those people not be left crushed and impoverished by the blank workings of the state machine.

The only question I asked was a rather obvious one: given the Government’s dismal track record when it came to doing anything with IT, wasn’t a monstrously convoluted digital reform like this asking for trouble? IDS was cheerily unperturbed. All would be well.

That period of optimism, that genuine attachment to a policy he had worked up in opposition through his think tank the Centre for Social Justice, seems an awfully long time ago now. UC has, as its critics predicted, been something of a dead weight since its inception. What could go wrong has gone wrong – rollout delays, spiralling costs, huge budget cuts, claimants left dangling, and of course a massive computer screw -up.

It didn’t help – and perhaps even killed at birth UC’s chances of succeeding – that this expensive reform to an area that takes up 35 per cent of total government spending came at a time when the administration was committed to a course of unbending austerity. Chancellors on the prowl for savings traditionally look on welfare as the slowest moving of antelopes. George Osborne proved no different. The recently published diaries of the LibDem coalition minister David Laws are a fascinating insight into the political troubles that stalked the policy’s launch and early years. He reports ominously on a presentation on UC implementation given by Mr Duncan Smith to the Cabinet in April 2013: “He tries to sound incredibly informed, but one gets the impression that the depth of knowledge isn’t there, and that if he was to be grilled intensively, it would all fall to pieces in five seconds.”

This was a view Mr Laws shared with Mr Osborne, who made no attempt to hide his disdain for what he saw as the intellectual limitations of his colleague, rolling his eyes at or simply ignoring Mr Duncan Smith when the latter contributed to ministerial discussions. Despite Mr Laws’s early support for the new credit, he found his enthusiasm waning as he saw more of the ideology that drove Conservative ministers. “The Tories have a real lack of understanding and interest in finding out about the way poorer people live. Their own experiences just don’t include the problems of those who have nothing.”

Whether this is true or not, Mr Osborne cut billions from the welfare budget as he pursued austerity, his conviction that the state should be smaller, and, perhaps, a desire to irritate IDS.

What worries me about the grim arc of the Universal Credit experiment is that political incompetence, a lack of real Cabinet commitment and an obsession with cutting public spending has ended up giving a bad name to a policy that, done well, may well have displayed many of the merits Mr Duncan Smith initially claimed for it. As Sir John Major said recently, UC, “although theoretically impeccable, is operationally messy, socially unfair and unforgiving” and it is “time for the Conservative Party to show its heart again”. A lack of care for the less well-off slips all too easily into the broader perception of a Brexit-obsessed, anti-immigrant, small-minded nasty party.

For all its flaws, we should remember that there were good reasons for undertaking the reform. What existed before was, in its own way, equally scandalous – the phrase “dependency culture’” may be clichéd but that doesn’t make it entirely untrue. People were not sufficiently incentivised towards work, and many were trapped on benefits for far too long, squandering any chance of improving their lot, losing their confidence and sense of self-worth; those who did take low-paying jobs risked losing more than they earned due to the cliff-edge nature of the system.

There are many decent, humane reasons for effective and fair welfare reform, even if Universal Credit has in practice proved too often to be indecent, inhumane, ineffective and unfair.