Universal Credit: simplification or personalisation? Paul Spicker Local Economy 2012 27(5-6) 496-501 Abstract Current proposals for welfare reform in the UK are based on a Universal Credit, intended simultaneously to simplify the structure of benefits while offering sensitive and rapid responsiveness to personal circumstances. The two objectives are in conflict, and neither can be achieved by the proposals. Social security systems are complex, not because of a failure of conception or management, but because they do complex things. Some benefits are intrinsically complex in their design. In the UK, the Jobseeker’s Allowance requires consideration of availability for employment, work record, financial status; Housing Benefit includes financial status, housing costs and household composition. Some benefits are complex because they cover a wide range of contingencies. Put together a clutch of relatively simple benefits - for example, to cover funerals, discharge from institutional care, emergency loans and maternity - and the resulting provision (in this case, the ‘Social Fund’, introduced in 1988) will look anything but simple. Some benefits have complex rules: the effect of needs assessments, conditionality, irregular periods of entitlement and transitional arrangements commonly generates difficulties in administration or review. Management structures need to be highly developed, simply by virtue of the number and variety of payments they have to make; the same is true whether they deal with millions of people across a large geographical area, or when they are decentralised and decentralisation creates administrative diversity. And finally, benefits systems have become complex because they deal with complex lives. People’s circumstances often change with great rapidity: family status, household composition, income and employment change at startling speed, while capacity can fluctuate on a daily or weekly basis. 1 There is considerable political support in the UK for simplification in principle. Even if specialists in social security policy are few and far between, the Members of Parliament who take constituency surgeries encounter a constantly unfolding catalogue of arbitrariness, confusion, failures of information, delays, computer glitches or problems of unfairness. The prescriptions seem straightforward: apply more generic criteria, have fewer rules, reduce the number of benefits, and be prepared to accept some “rough justice” (the term used in the 1978 reforms ), 2 because it is not possible to satisfy everyone. However, any of those options implies that benefits will have to be less responsive to the differences in people’s circumstances. In so far as benefits are currently paid at minimal levels, any reduction or reallocation implies that some people will fall below the current minimum. If the scheme is responsive, it will be complex; if it P Spicker, 2011, How social security works, Bristol: Policy press, ch.14. 1 Department of Health and Social Security, 1978, Social Assistance, London: DHSS. 2