Universal Credit: The Challenge Ahead
The Briefing Room
BBC
4.8 • 731 Ratings
🗓️ 9 September 2021
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
At the start of the first pandemic lockdown the government announced a £20 uplift for those receiving Universal Credit, the benefit designed to help those of working age with their living costs. It made clear at the time that the extra money was temporary and, in the coming weeks, payments will start to be reduced.
But is a cliff-edge drop in the income of more than two-and-a-half million families the right step to be taking? And how best are the UK's poorest to be supported with the country still recovering from the pandemic?
David Aaronovitch and his guests evaluate how well Universal Credit has been helping those in and out of work and what the uplift has achieved for families and single person households.
Is giving more money to claimants the most effective way of helping them in the post-pandemic economy? Or, with prices rising for household essentials, should the government now be thinking about other measures to help those struggling to make ends meet?
How do we help the least well-off while being fair to taxpayers and not subsidising employers paying low wages?
Those taking part (in order of appearance): Fran Bennett of the Department for Social Policy & Intervention at Oxford University; Tom Waters, Senior Research Economist at the Institute for Fiscal Studies; Gemma Tetlow, Chief Economist at the Institute for Government; and Deven Ghelani, founder of the social policy business, Policy in Practice.
Producers Simon Coates, Jim Booth and Kirsteen Knight Editor Jasper Corbett
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, radio, podcasts. |
| 0:06.1 | Welcome to the briefing room with me, David Ronovich. |
| 0:11.0 | The briefing room, 28 minutes, in which you and I get the top experts to explain a big issue of the day. |
| 0:18.2 | This week, soon, nearly six million benefit claimants will lose the £20 |
| 0:23.1 | £20 weekly pandemic uplift. What impact will that have on them? And are there better ways |
| 0:29.2 | we could help those in need? In today's Financial Times, it was reported that an internal government analysis described an |
| 0:39.4 | upcoming change as potentially catastrophic. That change is the ending of the £20 weekly |
| 0:46.3 | uplift received by all universal credit claimants during the pandemic. Getting things to people |
| 0:53.8 | is always the easy bit of government. Taking them away is all the pandemic. Giving things to people is always the easy bit of government. |
| 0:56.0 | Taking them away is always the hardest, |
| 1:00.0 | especially when there are six million losers. |
| 1:05.0 | So what will the impact of the withdrawal be? |
| 1:08.0 | And might there be better ways of helping the less well off? |
| 1:13.5 | Step into the briefing room and together we'll find out. |
| 1:23.9 | First, what is universal credit? Why was it introduced and who gets it? And how well is it working? Fran Bennett is an expert on welfare at the Department of Social Policy and |
| 1:29.0 | Intervention at Oxford University. Brian Bennett, what exactly is universal credit? So what it is that |
| 1:37.7 | it brought together various means-tested benefits and tax credits, which were either to help with your income or to help |
| 1:48.6 | with additional costs. The one means tested benefit, or the one main means tested benefit that's |
| 1:53.8 | left out of this is help with council tax, local taxation. And it's assessed each month. So it's what your circumstances are on a |
| 2:04.6 | particular day, which is kind of your assessment day in the month. Let's be clear. Who gets it? |
| 2:11.5 | Well, because it's means tested, it's for people on a low income and also for people without much in savings. |
| 2:20.8 | But the crucial thing about universal credit is that it's paid to people in and out of work. |
... |
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