Universal credit

Having known something about all the anomalies of the old benefits systems, I have always been a something of a fan of Universal Credit, designed to do away with them. And without having troubled to find out why it seems to be so unpopular - beyond vaguely thinking that it was probably down to not enough money having been thrown at it to ensure that there were no losers - with most changes to benefits resulting in both winners and losers, however right minded or well intentioned those changes might have been. I have also seen claims that Universal Credit puts too much weight on everybody claiming benefits being both willing and able to do their claiming online.

So I was interested to read yesterday that one of the anomalies of the new system is that it also puts too much weight on most people being on steady incomes and gives bad results when peoples' incomes fluctuate from week to week or from month to month - as, it seems, a lot of them do these days, with a large proportion of the working population, particularly the lower paid, being on flexible contracts. With two four week wage packets falling in one calendar month being another cause of fluctuation and bad results.

First thought was that this was a real nail in the coffin of Universal Benefit. Second thought was that with a single universal benefit, there will be just one way of calculating income, rather than one way for each of a number of benefits. So maybe the calculation of income does need to be fixed - but at least there is only one calculation to fix.

Which sounds easy enough, but how does one fix an ongoing calculation without upsetting still more people? Changing the calculation is almost certain either to create more winners and losers or to increase the cost of the benefit as a whole, creating lots of losers among tax payers at large. Just one of the many tricks one has to turn as a benefits engineer...

PS: although I know something of the complexity of benefits systems and of the job-creation habits of private sector IT contractors, I remain puzzled why the new system has turned out to be so difficult and so expensive to implement.