Tories nervous Universal Credit will founder due to HMRC ICT

Doubts about the ICT behind the Government's plan to introduce Universal Credit have pushed it to the top of a list of projects at risk of failing, according to a report in The Daily Telegraph.

According to the paper, a team of senior Whitehall officials and industry experts has been detailed to look into how the joint DWP and HMRC project - due to merge 30 welfare benefits into one - is shaping up, as worries persist in at least some parts of Whitehall ICT that HMRC is too sanguine about meeting a central deadline for a real-time PAYE element.

The chairman of the PAC (Commons Public Accounts Committee) has gone so far as call the plan "a train crash waiting to happen".

The real-time technology that will underpin Universal Credit is being developed using agile technology techniques in which individual parts of the solution are produced on a monthly basis. The plan is to go live with Universal Credit in October 2013, with a transitional period of around four years.

HMRC got a £100 million extra boost in the Comprehensive Spending Review to build such a system to track people's job changes and provide the foundation for government plans for a universal benefits programme.

That would be crucial to the whole Universal Credit idea and if it slips - so would the bigger programme.

Questions over the ability of HMRC to deliver on its proposed timetable have been aired a number of times already. The PAC heard in May that there may be delays in delivering the project after doubts were raised - though strongly denied by DWP CIO Joe Harley - that the 2013 deadline really can be met.

Now Chancellor George Osborne is said to be worried that problems with Universal Credit, the brainchild of Secretary of State for Work and Pensions Ian Duncan-Smith, could jeopardise Conservative election prospects in 2014.

A Universal Credit system is expected to lead to a substantial increase in the take-up of currently unclaimed benefits, helping those most in need. The extra benefits would lift around 950,000 individuals out of poverty, including 350,000 children and more than 600,000 working-age adults.

But critics have consistently wondered about the heavy emphasis on online delivery for the proposed system and if it will fall into the fatal trap of becoming yet another "mega-IT" project - with all the negative implications that seems to bring with it for central government.