£300 million spent by DWP on Universal Credit IT and £34 million written off – is this early progress?
According to the Universal Credit: early progress report the DWP cannot ‘assess the value’ of the £300 already spent on developing systems.
The National Audit Office’s recently published report reveals that over 70 per cent of the £425 million spent by Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) to date has been on IT systems. The DWP has already written off £34 million of its new systems and does not yet know if they will support national roll-out.
According to the Universal Credit: early progress report the DWP cannot ‘assess the value’ of the £300 already spent on developing systems.
The report is available at: http://www.nao.org.uk/press-releases/universal-credit-early-progress/
The DWP was unable to explain how it originally decided on its ambitious plans or evaluated their feasibility
The National Audit Office’s report has concluded that the Department for Work and Pensions has not achieved value for money in its early implementation of Universal Credit and that the DWP was overly ambitious in both the timetable and scope of the programme.
In early 2013, the Department was forced to stop work on its plans for national roll-out and reassess its options for the future. The report recommends that the DWP scales back its delivery ambitions and sets out realistic plans.
Inclusion London voiced concerns about the Universal Credit IT project, highlighting previous failures in government IT programmes, such as NHS patient records system, we also questioned the feasibility of disabled people accessing a benefit through an online application. See Inclusion London’s response to the select committee inquiry: https://www.inclusionlondon.org.uk/campaigns-and-policy/facts-and-information/welfare-reform/universal-credit-inquiry-inclusion-london-responds/
Inclusion London disagrees with the report’s assessment that, ‘The programme still has potential to create significant benefits for society’. We believe it is shameful the millions of pounds has already been wasted on a failing IT systems, when 446,000 Disabled people will lose £2,2 billion by 2018 due to the impact of Universal Credit, according to research conducted by Demos.
The government has been in a rush to implement Universal Credit so it is also shameful that Ian Duncan Smith is not taking responsibility for the problems laid out in the report, but instead he is placing the blame for the fiasco on his civil servants. More information about this is available at:http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/sep/05/universal-credit-iain-duncan-smith? http://bit.ly/1anVgYN