Universal Credit = social control

I joined the DHSS in July 1980, just over a year after Thatcher had won her first general election. Her onslaught upon the welfare state and her tearing up of the post-war consensus had yet to begin, so the benefits system I initially worked within was the one developed over the 1960s and 1970s.

I was assigned to work on Supplementary Benefit, a means-tested benefit that to some extent could be tailored to suit a claimant's individual circumstances. One feature was that Supp Ben, as we called it, was paid in advance. For example, if you were finished from work with, say, two weeks pay, you would receive your first payment on the 15th day. If there was no final income whatsoever that needed to be taken into account, the first payment was due on the actual day the claim was made without any waiting period at all. Approximately 90% of new and repeat claims were assessed on the day they were received in our office and appropriate payments authorised.

This was the system in operation at the time of the TV series 'Boys From The Blackstuff', not noted for depicting the DHSS in a positive light, and subsequently during the 1980s the benefit system was increasingly characterised as a heartless and bureaucratic branch of an oppressive welfare state to the extent that some staff were reluctant to tell outsiders where they worked. The irony is that the benefit system of that time seems almost benevolent when compared to the current one.

Things became worse when the Thatcher regime turned its 'reforming' zeal towards benefits, replacing Supp Ben by Income Support which did not include any of the old special additions, and which was paid in arrears. Grants for essential household equipment were replaced by budgeting loans, and if there was a gap between your final income and your first benefit payment, and there usually was, you could claim a crisis loan. All such loans were subsequently deducted in instalments from your benefit.

That system, introduced by a Tory government, is the one now being dismantled by another Tory government with the introduction of Universal Credit. One feature of UC is that you can claim it whether you are in or out of work with your benefit progressively reducing the more hours you work and money you earn - for every extra £1 you earn after tax, you will lose 63p in benefits. In theory this is an improvement on previous rigid earnings rules that had meant that your means-tested benefits would be stopped completely if you worked for 16 hours or more.

However cuts to UC have made it significantly less generous. To give one example: the work allowance has been cut so your benefit begins to reduce after you have earned a smaller amount of money. Another feature is that UC is paid in arrears and you have wait five weeks before you receive your first payment. The official excuse for this is that the world of benefits should as far as possible mirror the world of employment. You can claim an advance to cover those five weeks but it is then deducted from your money over the following year, thus leaving you with even less to live on.

Switching from the old benefits to UC has both winners and losers, with those on the lowest incomes standing to lose the most. Transitional arrangements were put in place to ensure no one lost out during the switchover, but this protection doesn't cover either new claimants or people who come off UC and then reapply.

There are also various tripwires that make it incredibly easy to be sanctioned, thus causing UC to be stopped, for failing to comply with the stringent conditions. Appeals against decisions can take months – one example I heard of was 50 weeks – during which you have no money. People can end up with huge debts, and the number of evictions of people on UC is significantly higher than for those on the old benefits. Food bank usage also escalates in areas when UC is rolled out.

UC is a benefit that has changed the purpose of the benefits system from providing support to coercing people into minimum wage, or even zero hours, employment. It is easy to see how a system that produces large numbers of demoralised workers who are obliged to accept poorly-paid, often unsuitable, jobs would appeal to a government consisting of extremely wealthy business people.

Nothing I have written here should be interpreted as an attack on the hard-pressed staff who have to deliver the system as instructed. Calls for staff to be more flexible miss the point that in the civil service you have to do the job as you are told, or you will be in trouble.

I can give an example of this from my own time. One DSS job I had for a while was on the now-scrapped system of crisis loans. I was explaining how they worked to a social worker friend, who simply stated, “Well, I'd pay them all”. I told her that she wouldn't because the monthly budget was strictly limited and if it was all spent too soon, everyone would have to be refused for the rest of the month, irrespective of circumstances. If you persistently blew the budget, you'd be done for inefficiency and in the long run could be dismissed. I expect that UC staff today are under even more stringent restrictions; there is virtually no room in the system for them to manoeuvre.

Indeed, anyone who has watched the recent BBC programmes, 'Universal Credit: Inside the Welfare State' (currently available on iPlayer) will have heard a DWP staff member point out that some of her colleagues are on UC. Such staff will have been subjected to precisely the same UC regime as the claimants that they deal with in the course of their duties. This refutes the perception that I sometimes used to come across that DWP staff are well-paid and consequently cannot empathise with their public; to put it bluntly, they are not paid to empathise, but to administer the system according to instructions that are based in law, often with inadequate staffing levels and sometimes on low pay themselves.

My opinion is that UC has been designed by very wealthy politicians who are utterly incapable of comprehending that some people can be in situations in which they have absolutely no money or resources to fall back on and nowhere to turn to for help. This complete failure of empathy by ministers for the financially more vulnerable members of our society provides a revealing view of the dysfunctional mindset of many of those at the highest levels of government.

But what else could we expect from a government that deliberately developed a hostile environment for migrants and who treated the Windrush generation with such uncaring contempt? I'm just glad I got out of the DWP before the UC rollout had begun.