Professor Jane Millar:

I am happy to start. The Deputy has asked a great set of questions that really highlight the difficulties and issues. I will pick up the first few questions and leave my colleagues with the others. For me, universal credit was never a good idea. I was never convinced by the principle of simplification because different benefits, as I said, have different purposes and are there for different people at different times. I always thought there would be challenges, particularly in trying to integrate people in and out of work. I always thought that was likely to cause problems.

I outlined at the beginning how long it took. In regard to the balance of time, not enough time was spent at the beginning on design and thinking about it. Professor Patrick made some points about test and learn that are important. Not enough time was spent designing the system and that affected the implementation. Many of the delays were around IT and also capacity within the Department to be able to deliver such a major change. That is a problem and it would take a long time.

In regard to whether the existing problems carried forward, they largely did. Universal credit jammed together the existing system. Rather than saying we should take a clean piece of paper and think about what a means test would look like and the sorts of things that need to be considered, such as the time periods, the disregards, the takers and so on, largely what happened was the existing system was jammed together to make universal credit. More time on that is important. It means a constant means test. There is a lot of evidence that people find that stressful, intrusive and difficult and do not necessarily want to engage with it. I will leave my colleagues to come in on the other points.