General Chat

The more I read and hear about the Universal Credit the more I am convinced that this is just another bad piece of legislation which will end in chaos, and those on low wages and the vulnerable will be the ones that suffer :-|

I do not think this policy has been properly thought through and that the rush to implement it was a political decision to try and pacifying the disruptive right wing MP'S of the conservative party.

They are not only blind and deaf to all criticism surrounding this policy - they are also completely of touch with the ordinary working people and the genuinely vulnerable people of this country.

List of Conclusions and Recommendations relating to Universal Credit by the Work and Pensions Committee:-

http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201213/cmselect/cmworpen/576/57612.htm

Am computer illiterate to a high degree, but you just know that Governments and Local Authorities will make a pudding of anything to do with computers.

My OH was an expert of SIMS (educational software?). No longer because she transferred to another section of LG - but still mentions the strange and unique computer systems in her new role. I read Maggies's posts about doing away with Windows and messing up the admin of courses and often wonder why they have these strange and complicated systems.

You cannot help but feel that somebody in on an earner. That happens in private companies very often too, but people get sacked and prosecuted usually - before the profits get so low that company folds and everyone is sacked.

I think it is too late for IDS. It will be better now to put all the due benefits in a big cash box in each town hall every Friday and let local residents fight over them. As an elderly person, I should still be able to grab the £200 pension every week that I am entitled to for at least 5 years. I can camp outside on a Thursday night and use my shoulders and occasional punch to the kidneys when they open doors. But in 5 years time, I may well be much weaker and unable to get at my money - so it will be natural section. :-(

the head of the housing ass where the wife works has stated they expect rent arrears of over 1 million pounds due to the combined effects of the bedroom tax and universal credit .the wife has to visit a new tenant today who has a drink problem guess where his rent money is likely to go
last week they shut down the offices and all the staff were out visiting the 600+ tenants that are on some form of benefit to ensure they knew what was going to be the effect on them

The general consensus seem to be that it will be a disaster.
We are only a small group, but would imagine that the wider population will feel the same.
Are the politicians blind & deaf or just too self important to listen to the people who are affected by the changes. Not just benefit claimants, but the poor devils who have to try & administer it.

a lot of private rented poss now most in birmingham state no ss so when people get hit by the bedroom tax they wont even be able to move into smaller private property

Dear All

Hello

Does this mean you have to wait a whole month before receiving your
first months benefit?

Aparently, IDS said this would help prepare people for work.

Exactly where are the jobs coming from?

Some benefits are paid every two weeks and can just about be managed but it should stop there.


Absolute shambles.

Take gentle care
Best wishes
EOS
xx

There was a time when privately rented flats had to be of a 'certain' standard, for (at the time) DHSS recipients to be moved in to.
My friend upgraded his flats, as tenants on benefit were welcomed - landlords were assured of their rent.
Now, tenants are likely to be forced out by the bedroom tax, with nowhere to go.

The benefit includes rent which at the moment is paid directly to the landlord. In future the claiment will get it. Does anyone in the government seriously believe that rent arrears will not happen. This government has no clue to the real world.

I have a friend who lets out 2 flats in his large house, he is dreading this happening, because he KNOWS that one of his tenants will not pay his rent.

A close rellie of RTR is a senior civil servant at the DWP. Whatever cock up follows another it is not their fault.

Although it often suits ministers to claim otherwise policy and execution of it come from the govt ministers. Senior civil servants just get on doing the best they can with it for better or for worse. Of course they "advise and warn" but if the horse has the bit between its teeth then away it will go.

It is very easy to mock up any sort of computer system to run a demo on a desktop. A toy town system in, say, Lancashire is not a whole lot harder.

There are five great big stone wall obstacles for real world delivery of large scale IT systems. The late failed NHS system crashed into all of them.

(1) Scaling up - on a trivial letter members will have seen the chaos on Genes last year when it became obvious that the trial new system had not been stress tested.
When it comes to the scale of the DWP benefits system then it is the deep blue sea.

(2) Complexity - the more disparate systems that have to be welded together, the more analysts have to weld together the immovable force of incoherent legislation and the rock of Hal tombstone IT logic then the surer a broken project.

(3) Real time v batch - most large scale computer systems run in batch mode with operations run on a daily basis e.g. banks. The major exceptions are manufacturing and aviation for obvious reasons. DWP and the government IT has practically no experience with real time IT systems yet apparently benefits are to be recalibrated on a monthly basis. OK this is not true "real time" but it is more than enough to crash the whole HMCS PAYE system, employers systems and create all manner of knock on problems.

(4) Confidentiality Far too much of this sort if project is being carried out in the sub-continent. In part this is due to high level politics, in part trying to save money. Either way not only do a great many of the sub-contractors not have the required skills but the leakage of confidential Western Europe commercial data is already a massive problem.

(5) Resilience - what happens when part of the system has incorrect data ( GIGO or garbage in, garbage out ) OR just stops functioning ? We have already seen what happens when this happens with retail banks with back end processing in India. I might add that the undersea data fibre links connecting India and the UK have already been badly damaged (repaired after weeks) and are very susceptible to terrorism.

And this is without the obvious nightmare for the DWP "customers" as they refer to benefit caimants.

Far from the senior civil servants being part and parcel of a looming disaster they are doing their utmost to force a Walter Mitty project back into reality with the current small scale project. If they are successful then instead of a jolly crash it will be implemented piecemeal over a realistic time scale - about 10 years.

What do other countries do? They avoid the problem by not having nationwide unitary computer systems.

quem Jupiter vult perdere, dementat prius

going to be absolute hell
all the benefits in 1 lump sum paid monthly to the main claimants bank account

where do you think the rent etc is going to fit into some peoples priority list especially if the have a drink or drugs dependency or even just mental health problems
at the moment the money is paid every 2 weeks and some people cant manage their finances monthly i feel some people will just not cope

You & me both, Wisechild.
I probably said it on anothr thread, but at the cost of £250,000, Hampshire County Council introduced a 'new' IT system - courtesy, of course, of a friend of a senior councillor.

Me & 4 colleagues are the admin for courses run for care homes - both HCC and Private.
As you can imagine, this means lots of courses, and lots of handouts, and course papers.
Whereas once, we would name a folder with the course title, and file all relevant course stuff in that folder, labelled day1, day 2 etc, now, we no longer have folders. Everything is in a list, and has to have a specific title added to it. Also can't just open an item, have to 'Check it out', then 'check it in' when finished. It also doesn't automatically save,and is so crap it slows everything down & regularly crashes, thus ensuring anything you have dome is lost!

To send an e-mail with an attachment to someone who doesn't have this system (the majority then) not takes 3 moves instead of 1.

There have been many complaints about this system, but the 'official' comeback is that 'windows' wasn't safe enough!

Hey ho, we're just the ones who use it - senior councillor (who has 2 secretaries to admin his 'voluntary' status, that gleans him over £47,000 pa, plus free petol) doesn't want to lose face does he?

My apologies, I meant senior civil servants. Its the senior ones who dictate policy and mess everything up, its the poor workers who have to follow and apply their mistakes.

That may be true of senior Civil Servants, but having been a run of the mill penpusher for years , I can assure you that the vast majority of Civil Servants are just work horses who get blamed when the harebrained schemes thought up by those as the top turn out to be crashing failures.
The greatest problem with the latest idea is that it isn´t just one benefit. It´s an amalgamation of several, each with different criteria for eligibility. Therefore it´s not a simple "one benefit,one form" unfortunately.

Of course it will be a disaster - its being run by civil servants. You know who they are don't you? Unsackable, over-pensioned and rewarded for interia at the end of their career with an OBE.

The theory is good, one benefit should mean one form. But it won't..............

Well I've never sat in a freezing house without money to pay for the gas either. I don't think you have to have personal experience of such disasters. I do remember sitting in a freezing house by torch and candle light during the miner's strikes - does that qualify ?

A little mentioned gotcha of the new system is the calamitous effect it will have on housing associations. At the moment HA can get funding on very good terms as a lot of their income comes directly from councils and well over 95% of tenants not getting total HB pay their rent more or less on time. With the new system HA funding will cost them significantly more even if everybody pays on time ( which of course, they won't).

There can only be bad outcomes. (a) the HA will not be able to fund new social housing or significant improvements (b) rents will go up for people least able to afford them (c) possession orders will rocket.

Getting businesses used to real time PAYE filing would on its own be a massive undertaking. I am amazed that Osbourne has agreed to this. Maybe he is a secret socialist 5th column determined to bring the sky crashing down on his party.

The only possible conclusions are that either IDS and the Tory front bench are bogglingly stupid or that they intend to drive the country back into the dark days of the 1920s. Take your pick.

The biggest fault with this, as I see it is the amount of money that will have been spent on an IT system which will almost certainly turn out to be unfit for the purpose. The NHS failure is a good example.......we´re talking millions, not thousands.
That money could have been much better spent in my view.
Maggie is quite correct when she says that the majority of MPs have no idea how ordinary people, even on relatively adequate salaries, have to budget their income.
Pensioners & others in low paid jobs don´t stand a chance. They will always have to sacrifice something in order to pay for essentials.
We are supposed to have some excellent IT brains in Britain, yet a country like Spain has an NHS computerised system which works perfectly in my experience. We also have bus passes for pensioners which give cheap, not free, travel & subsidised holidays for pensioners,& although we don´t get free prescriptions, we only pay 10% of the total charge.
This seems to help everyone because there is a small amount being contributed by the less well off, while people who can afford it pay the full amount.
I wouldn´t have thought it would be too difficult for all the so called economists in England to introduce a similar system instead of making so many people dependant on benefits at a time when work is difficult to come by.

maggiewinchester, it's all to do with what - David Cameron. George Osborne, and Iain Duncan Smith mean when they talk about fairness and us all being in it together :-D

Just had a thought.

How many MP's do you think know how to use a computer properly?
Expenses are probably put through by PA's, anything they need to look at, probably PA again, any forms to be filled in - PA.

So, they won't understand the problems of online forms not saving.

The majority of front bench MP's have loads of money, so don't understand what it's like to be unable to afford to buy food.
(they can get it free - courtesy of the tax payer - anyway :-P)
They don't pay rent - (courtesy of the tax payer again) - so have no idea about that, and of course IDS lives rent free.
They've never sat in a freezing house unable to afford the gas.
They can't understand why someone wouldn't/couldn't have a bank account.

Nice to know they (and in particular IDS) think they know and understand sooo much about how the other half lives, that they feel they can re-arrange people's lives at the blink of an eye and people will cope.

A lot of excellent feedback in response to my initial post, glad to see I am not the only one with reservations about this project.

In regards to the software proving to be unsuitable, it will be in good company when it joins the hundreds of other failed pieces of government software in that huge warehouse marked "NFFP" (Not Fit For Purpose) :-|

I am sorry to say that, although the general aim of simplification is good, I have no faith in Government IT projects.
And I foresee that paying housing benefit to claimants and not directly to landlords is going to lead to massive numbers of rent arrears and evictions.

(Sorry if that repeats what Wisechild says, we were typing at the same time)