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New DWP secretary Stephen Crabb says he won't cancel Universal Credit

Iain Duncan Smith's replacement says he is 'committed' to the troubled reform programme

Wednesday 13 April 2016 16:37 BST

Stephen Crabb has been appointed as the new Work and Pensions Secretary (AFP/Getty)

The newly-appointed Work and Pensions Secretary has signalled he will not cancel the Government’s flagship Universal Credit welfare reform plan.

In his first speech in the role, Stephen Crabb said he was “committed” to the plan, which was the pet project of his predecessor Iain Duncan Smith.

Mr Duncan Smith stepped down in March after the most recent Budget, warning that the Government was balancing its books on the back of society’s most vulnerable with cuts to welfare.

Universal Credit, which seeks to integrate most welfare benefits into a single payment and reduce disincentives for people to move into work, has been the target of steep cuts by the Chancellor George Osborne.

Among elements slashed before it has been rolled out include work allowances and in-work benefits set to replace tax credits.

The programme has also been beset by delays, with the Government’s Major Projects Authority watchdog treating it as an all-new project in 2014 after a “reset”.

This status comes despite it having been announced at the Tory conference in 2010 and legislated for in the 2012 Welfare Reform Act.

£40 million spent on IT for the project was also completely written off in 2013 after it emerged that work had been unsuitable.

7 ways the Tories have ‘helped’ disabled people

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1/77 ways the Tories have ‘helped’ disabled people

7 ways the Tories have ‘helped’ disabled people

Closing Remploy factories

The Work and Pensions Secretary called time on Britain’s system of Remploy factories, which provided subsidised and sheltered employment to disabled people. People employed at the factories protested against their closure and said they provided gainful work. “Is it a kindness to stick people in some factory where they are not doing any work at all? Just making cups of coffee?” Mr Duncan Smith said at the time, defending the decision. “I promise you this is better.” The Remploy organisation was privatised and sold to American workfare provider Maximus, with the majority of the organisation’s factories closed. The future of the remaining sites is unclear

7 ways the Tories have ‘helped’ disabled people

Scrapping the Independent Living Fund

The £320m Independent Living Fund was established in 1988 to give financial support to people with disabilities. It was scrapped on July 1 2015, with 18,000 often severely disabled people losing out by an average of £300 a week. The money was generally used to help pay for carers so people could live in communities rather than institutions. Councils will get a boost in funding to compensate but it will not cover the whole cost of the fund. This new cash also doesn’t have to be spent on the disabled

7 ways the Tories have ‘helped’ disabled people

Cut payments for the disabled Access To Work scheme

Iain Duncan Smith is bringing forward a policy that will reduce payments to some disabled people from a scheme designed to help them into work. The £108m scheme, which helps 35,540 people, will be capped on a per-used basis, potentially hitting those with the more serious disabilities who currently receive the most help. The single biggest users of the fund are people who have difficulty seeing and hearing. The cut will come in from October 2015. The charity Disability UK says the scheme actually makes the Government money because the people who gain access to work tend pay tax that more than covers its cost. The DWP does not describe the reduction as a “cut” and says it will be able to spread the money more thinly and cover more people

7 ways the Tories have ‘helped’ disabled people

Cut Employment and Support Allowance

The latest Budget included a £30 a week cut in disability benefits for some new claimants of Employment and Support Allowance (ESA). The Government says it is equalising the rate of disability benefits with Jobseekers Allowance because giving disabled people more help is a “perverse incentive”. The people affected by this cut are those assessed as having a limited capability for work but as being capable of some “work-related activity”. A group of prominent Catholics wrote to Mr Duncan Smith to say there was “no justification” for this cut. Mental health charity Mind, said the cut was “insulting and misguided”

7 ways the Tories have ‘helped’ disabled people

Risk homelessness with a sharp increase disability benefit sanctions

Official figures in the first quarter of 2014 found a huge increase in sanctions against people reliant on ESA sickness benefit. The 15,955 sanctions were handed out in that period compared to 3,574 in the same period the year before, 2013 – a 4.5 times increase. The homelessness charity Crisis warned at the time that the sharp rise in temporary benefit cuts was “cruel and can leave people utterly destitute – without money even for food and at severe risk of homelessness”. “It is difficult to see how they are meant to help people prepare for work,” Matt Downie, director of policy at the charity added

7 ways the Tories have ‘helped’ disabled people

Sending sick people to work because of broken fitness to work tests

In 2012 a government advisor appointed to review the Government’s Work Capability Assessment said the tests causing suffering by sending sick people back to work inappropriately. “There are certainly areas where it's still not working and I am sorry there are people going through a system which I think still needs improvement,” Professor Malcolm Harrington concluded. The tests are said to have improved since then, but as recently as this summer they are still coming in for criticism. In June the British Psychological Society said there was “now significant body of evidence that the WCA is failing to assess people’s fitness for work accurately and appropriately”. It called for a full overhaul of the way the tests are carried out. The WCA appeals system has also been fraught with controversy with a very high rate of overturns and delays lasting months and blamed for hardship

7 ways the Tories have ‘helped’ disabled people

The bedroom tax

The Government’s benefit cut for people who it says are “under-occupying” their homes disproportionately affects disabled people. Statistics released last year show that around two-thirds of those affected by the under-occupancy penalty, widely known as the ‘bedroom tax’, are disabled. There have been a number of high profile cases of disabled people being moved out of specially adapted homes by the policy. In one case publicised by the Sunday People last week, a 48 year old man with cerebral palsy was forced to bathe in a paddling pool after the tax moved him out of his home with a walk-in shower. The Government says it has provided councils with a discretionary fund to help reduce the policy’s impact on disabled people, but cases continue to arise

Labour says the project risks being “stillborn” because cuts have undermined its stated purpose.

“I am absolutely committed to leading a continued, successful rollout of universal credit,” Mr Crabb said in his speech.

“That is a priority for me, as is continuing to embed it as the spine that runs through the welfare system.”

Iain Duncan Smith stepped down over cuts to welfare (Getty Images)

Mr Crabb’s appointment has been billed as a fresh start for the Government’s controversial welfare policies. In the first week of his appointment, cuts to the Personal Independence Payment were cancelled and reconciliatory noises made on other welfare cuts.

Owen Smith, Labour’s Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary, said: “Unless he reverses the cuts in the work allowance and restores the work incentives, it's going to leave millions of people worse off.”

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