IDS? He’s completely out-of-touch

If anyone is in doubt that the Tories are completely out of touch with the reality of life for people in Britain I’d advise them to read Iain Duncan Smith’s latest speech. His speech is an extraordinary attempt to claim everything is fine and rosy when it is clear to everyone else that the DWP is presiding over failing programmes which are wasting billions of taxpayers money.

Embarrassingly for Iain Duncan Smith each and every one of the major reforms he boasted about at length today have been roundly criticised by his own government and by independent financial auditors.

The Work Programme has failed to meet its own targets. The latest government figures showed only 27% of those aged 25 and over getting jobs lasting for more than 6 months. And on 2^nd July 2014 the National Audit Office said £11 million has already been wasted on the Work Programme (payments in error) and a further £25 million is at risk.

The Bedroom Tax was supposed to free up larger properties for families on the waiting list but last month a damning government report highlighted the abject failure of the policy with only 4.6 per cent of affected tenants downsizing within the social rented sector and found there had been big increases in rent arrears for those hit by this cruel tax on bedrooms.

The new Personal Independence Payments has been a disaster with hundreds of thousands stuck in a huge backlog waiting for an assessment. In February 2014 the National Audit Office said the delayed rollout of Personal Independence Payment had led to the loss of £140 million. And they warned, “Because it may take some time to resolve delays the Department has increased the risk that the programme will not deliver value for money in the longer term”. This year Iain Duncan Smith’s own department admitted the failure of its Personal Independence Payments and Work Capability Assessment saying; ‘The volume of assessments undertaken by providers on both contracts has fallen consistently below demand’

Today IDS spent nearly a quarter of his speech talking about Universal Credit, the government’s flagship welfare reform programme. ‘UC is working’ he claimed. But figures from his own department show the £12.8 billion Universal Credit programme is very far from ‘working’.

Iain Duncan Smith once promised that more than a million people would be claiming Universal Credit by April 2014. But the latest figures published by the DWP show fewer than 6,000. At the current rate of progress, based on the number of people going on Universal Credit every month, Iain Duncan Smith won’t achieve his target for another 1,222 years.

Over £100 million has already been written down and written off by Iain Duncan Smith on Universal Credit, with the Auditor General warning in the DWP’s annual report on 23^rd June 2014 that it still wasn’t achieving value for money. And Universal Credit was even called ‘lamentable’ by Francis Maude in January 2014

Today Iain Duncan Smith should have set out a detailed plan for rescuing this crisis-hit programme which has ground to a shuddering halt. Sadly the speech contained no detail and no clue about where this troubled programme is heading.

Despite spending over £600 million on Universal Credit only a handful of people are claiming the new benefit. And Iain Duncan Smith is either unable or unwilling to say when his government expects to roll out the programme across the country as they promised to do.

If the chaos we’ve seen over the last four years under Iain Duncan Smith is a guide, imagine what another five years of the Tories would mean for Britain.

Five more years of waste and delays to Universal Credit. Five more years of people suffering under the cruel Bedroom Tax. Five more years of people stuck in low-paid jobs relying on benefits to make ends meet costing taxpayers billions. And five more years of people stuck waiting for months for delayed assessments for Personal Independence Payments.

So the choice in nine months is a Tory economy that doesn’t work for working people adding billions to the social security bill and a Labour government that will make work pay and to get a grip of Iain Duncan Smith’s waste and chaos.

We’ll do that by;

• Getting young people off benefits and into work through our Compulsory Jobs Guarantee
• Scrapping the cruel, costly and unfair Bedroom Tax.
• Calling in the National Audit Office to conduct a full review of whether the Universal Credit can be rescued
• Raising the National Minimum Wage and introducing Living Wage Contracts to make work pay
• Tackling the underlying causes of rising housing benefits spending by building 200,000 homes a year by 2020
• Getting a grip of the Government’s shambolic roll out of disability benefits by reforming Work Capability Assessments and putting a limit for the time people wait for Personal Independence Payment claims
• Tackling the culture of waste in the DWP which is costing taxpayers billions of pounds

Today Iain Duncan Smith could have faced up to the huge waste and delays to Universal Credit, the failure of the Work Programme and the hardship caused by the Bedroom Tax. But sadly he didn’t because he’s completely out-of-touch like the rest of his Tory led government chums.

Only a Labour government to put in place the reforms Britain desperately needs to make work pay and get social security spending under control.

Rachel Reeves is Shadow Secretary of State for Work and Pensions