Why is Universal Credit allowed to keep racking up the cost, while rail projects get the axe?
Perhaps the answer has something to do with blame.
The government can blame railway companies for what some seem to be labelling out-of-control cost increases on improvement projects.
But Universal Credit is a plan initiated by the Conservative Party, and the Conservative Party must be seen to be right. Right?
So the cost continues to rocket out of control, creating knock-on problems across government budgets, and the Gentleman Ranker, Iain Duncan Smith, gets to make silly claims that everything is under control when it clearly isn’t.
The overall cost of Iain Duncan Smith’s key welfare scheme appears to have risen by £3bn to £15.8bn in two years, according to an official report that shows several other significant government programmes are also in danger of collapsing.Universal credit, the troubled programme that plans to roll six welfare benefits into one payment, has also suffered a further year’s delay and will not be fully implemented until 2020.
The figures are disclosed in a Major Projects Authority report. It also shows that more than half of all of the government’s leading projects, including HS2, are in danger of failing.
Universal Credit is late, and expensive – and even when it arrives, it will harm people rather than helping them.
It is as pointless as the Work and Pensions secretary himself.
Follow me on Twitter: @MidWalesMike
Join the Vox Political Facebook page.
If you have enjoyed this article, don’t forget to share it using the buttons at the bottom of this page. Politics is about everybody – so let’s try to get everybody involved!
Vox Political needs your help!
If you want to support this site
(but don’t want to give your money to advertisers)
you can make a one-off donation here:
Buy Vox Political books so we can continue
fighting for the facts.
Health Warning: Government! is now available
in either print or eBook format here:
The first collection, Strong Words and Hard Times,
is still available in either print or eBook format here:
it’s their baby mike and irrespective of the overall cost it will just continue
Why is IBS even still in a job? I reckon he has something on Cameron or he knows where certain bodies are buried from his time as Tory leader.
Presumably a typo but, nevertheless, very apt for the specimen in question.
So,the cost of maintaining safety is too much and upgrading the tracks and trains not worth it ?…mmmmm? It means no money for HS2 then…OR is everything going to be sacrificed so they can build the dam thing for all their cronies?
When one of the most delusional, dishonest and incompetent men in British politics was put in charge of one of the most complex and far-reaching programme of reforms imaginable, based not on his own ideas, knowledge or understanding but half-arsed and impractical designs patched together by the Centre for Social Justice, the disaster unfolding was inevitable wasn’t it? My bet is that Universal Credit will never be, at least in the form boasted about by IDS. It will eventually crash and burn but not before it has caused a huge amount of trouble and suffering for benefit claimants.
” Perhaps the answer has something to do with blame.”
Of course it is.
The poor are funding their own workhouse.
This is no ordinary workhouse made out of bricks and mortar.
IDS wants the biggest workhouse ever to be built. It will house millions of people under one digital roof. Everyone from the working poor, the disabled, the sick, the unemployed,
Its called Universal Credit, the house were no one will be in credit….EVER!!
If we get Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the Labour party, then such means of starvation and homelessness as Universal Credit and Bedroom Tax are doomed happily.
Good news UC will not see the light of day before next election.
Where Tory pet projects are concerned public money is no object.
It’s allowed to “rake up the cost’s” because it’s tax payers money being used to pay for it.
David Cameron can’t promise that he will keep his pre-election promise not to hit the disabled and vulnerable with extra cuts.
A man who doesn’t keep his pre-election promises is not fit to govern and we should be entitled to a new election NOW.
If it was as easy as that Cameron would have been gone before the end of 2010. I can’t think of a single 2010 election manifesto promise that he has stuck to.
That is what happened in Egypt with the brotherhood of man when elected they did not keep to their manifesto so the police slung them out and rightly so
i am not in favor of a police state but that is preferable to a dishonest government and with most governments from the UK through to the middle east always out to repress their people it’s no wonder break away groups form and that always leads to trouble
you can’t just form a government or a cult as only a decent person can form a proper government someone who has had a solid background someone that has been exposed to many faiths so they know the wider boundaries of the faith someone that’s well traveled but also someone that cares and more importantly understands care in the community
when I look today at of all the middle eastern and EU leaders I see none of the above at all only leaders who like to repress and dictate in one way or another all on the wrong side of leadership and all on the right wing of political dogma power to the landowners power for power sake with nothing at all on offer for the people who they purport to govern
And that is why the world today as we see day in day out make for a very dangerous place to be especially when traveling
You mean the Muslim Brotherhood, if I recall correctly.
indeed my error mike Muslim Brotherhood’ Brotherhood of Man are a British pop group :argh:
Now if only IDS and David Cameron were like me and just admit to errors
That just in itself makes a huge difference in how people perceive you and for the better i should add
Yes indeed. One can hardly expect the Muslim Brotherhood to sing “Save All Your Kisses For Me”!
LOL
It will get to the point that UC will become so bad and cause such a mess, that even the Tories will have to admit, in private only, that UC has failed and will quietly either rejig it or scrap it altogether like they did the poll tax but like that, they’ll never admit it has failed, their fragile, posh egos couldn’t handle that!