Iain Duncan Smith: faith-based politics

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/23/iain-duncan-smith-politics-faith

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Not so long ago, Downing Street staffers said they wanted the government to talk about just three things to the exclusion of all others. The fields in which the Tories felt confident they could carry the country were the deficit, schools and Iain Duncan Smith's welfare reforms. But for the second time in six months, important news about the gargantuan universal credit overhaul has emerged on a day when the calendar ensured that few would pay attention.

On 5 December, as George Osborne prepared to deliver his autumn statement, the Department for Work and Pensions let slip that it was no longer the plan for all benefit claimants to move on to the new scheme by 2017, as Mr Duncan Smith had stubbornly insisted, but that 700,000 would remain on the old system into the middle of the next parliament. On Friday, with all attention on election counts, Whitehall's Major Projects Authority released a report which did not merely rate UC as being at risk, but conceded that the setbacks had now reached a pass where it needed to be "reset" and classed as a new project. Although the report was always due around now, after election purdah, it could have been held off till next week to avoid the charge of burying news. As things stand, maladministration looks as if it could bury the plan.

Officials had patiently explained that universal credit would offer modest theoretical advantages in terms of rewarding work, enhancing take-home pay for some while blunting incentives for many married mothers. They explained, too, that merging several payments into one should simplify the paperwork, but that this needed to be weighed against the operational risks. The coalition's more forensic, and more cynical, members nonetheless seized enthusiastically on this little-understood reform of the administration of benefits because it gave them something plausible-sounding to say in response to the charge that they were doing nothing for the poor but cutting welfare. Mr Duncan Smith was in a different category. Having toured "broken Britain" in opposition, he felt moved to come up with the big answer, and has never doubted that UC is it.

Conviction-based politics is one thing, but conviction-based policy leads to trouble. With tunnel vision, IDS ignored council tax changes elsewhere in government which undermined his reform's rationale. His department has bitter experience of big bang reforms, as with child support, but has had successes with more incremental changes such as pension credit. Mr Duncan Smith hankered for his own big bang, however, and so turned a tin ear to official concerns. Along with all those who rely on benefit payments, he must now face the consequences.