Ms Fran Bennett:

I will come back on what Dr. Brewer said about the incentives issues. He was completely right about that. There were other objectives with the universal credit system. The minister in charge was on a mission to change people's lives for the better and to transform their lives. I am using his words, because he thought that welfare dependency was a huge problem and that people were not used to behaving in the ways they needed to behave in order to get into employment. Although some of the economic issues Dr. Brewer describes absolutely correctly were there, there were also motives about changing attitudes and behaviour which speak to the kind of thing that the committee member has just talked about. We cannot ignore those. The motivations with which a reform is undertaken are quite likely to shape the resulting outcome. There were also objectives about improving take up and therefore reducing poverty, about strengthening traditional families and so on. There were lots of other motives. An example is the issue of helping what were sometimes called chaotic families to budget monthly because that would help them to get into work. As Professor Patrick quite rightly said, the underlying approach to universal credit did not go with the grain of how people in poverty think and manage and organise their lives but actually wanted to change that. It had to do that through quite controlling mechanisms. That is how I see it.

I will say a little bit about the mostly rural distance problem the member talked about which is an absolutely real issue in the UK as well. When the UN special rapporteur for extreme poverty and human rights did a report on digitalisation, which was a global report, and might be useful to look at, he highlighted rural transport to offices as one of the key issues we should look at.

This is not what we are talking about at the moment, but France has for several years been considering some kind of amalgamation of means-tested benefits, originally called the revenu universel d'activité, RUA. It is now more likely to be called solidarité à la source. Spain is currently also looking at the possibility of amalgamating means-tested benefits. It may well be worthwhile for the committee to have a look at the ongoing debates within those two countries.