Professor Ruth Patrick:

I will speak on a few of those points. One of the first questions was on how long it would take to get there and whether the crinkles remained. Professor Millar spoke about those. The other point to keep in mind is that the UK had the two systems operating alongside each other for quite some time, which created a great deal of additional complexity. We in the UK are ten or 11 years into some people having some universal credit in terms of pathfinder areas. People and policymakers have to navigate two systems. We saw that during the pandemic when changes were made to universal credit but not to what were described as legacy claimants. That is an important added complexity. Some good work that was done by a colleague of ours, Dr. David Young, made a contrast between simplicity for the claimant and administrative simplicity and pointed out that they were not necessarily the same thing. We have heard about real-time earnings assessments and monthly earnings assessments. While those may be simpler to administer, we have also heard about how they may be more complex for claimants and may be drivers of uncertainty.

The point about the constant means testing that people are subject to and whether it enhances insecurity is a critical one. Sometimes, it is obvious why people’s universal credit payments are going up or down. They may have had two payments in one month, for example. Sometimes, though, it is less obvious. There are also matters that we have not touched on in this session yet; for example, debt deductions and – I am sorry about adding to the complexity of this discussion – the recovery of overpayments, which Professor Millar mentioned. When people are moved onto universal credit, an historical tax credit overpayment is often discovered, leading to major debt deductions. This causes significant problems in the system. Feeling like a universal credit payment is a place of insecurity is a common finding in the research I do, with it causing additional stress and anxiety for claimants.

As to what “digital” means and how people experience it, Ms Bennett was right to add that there have been efforts to support people. That is where I am critical of the test and learn approach. Such help should have been in place from the beginning. We should have anticipated that people would struggle with a digital-by-design system. It is important to emphasise that it is not only the application that is digital, but also the management of the claim. How does someone find out what he or she is getting that month, what he or she is expected to do, when his or her appointments are and how to deal with conditionality? That is all happening online. Through the Changing Realities project, we often hear that people have lost their Internet connections, partly because of their poverty, and are consequently unable to access online systems and find out what is happening. This causes big problems.

The related question of whether it takes humans out of the system links to what Dr. Brewer said about benefits being rolled out and the world then changing. One of the changes has been cuts to job centre budgets. There have been closures of job centres. There are deserts where there are no job centres anymore. We spoke with colleagues the other day about how going into a job centre was a very different experience now. The environment has changed, but not just because of universal credit. It has happened because of parallel changes being made in our social security system.