Welfare Reform Bill

I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, for that. I am at a slight loss at how to respond, in case it is an ““Am I beating my wife?”” question. I am getting some help from the Box. The universal credit will be built on a computer system, or rather a pair of medium-sized computer systems. We have a careful introduction process. One of the options we had, if I can explain it in layman’s terms, was that we could have picked everyone up electronically out of current systems, moved them over and dropped them into the universal credit, with effectively a Big Bang approach—go for it. That would have been the conceptual framework in which the noble Baroness asked her question. We are not doing that. We are moving people into the system over an extended period. We will start with the flow in October 2013, and then as we get the system working we will have some managed migrations over a four-year period. It is not the Big Bang approach—where you wait for the thing to go, and then you throw everyone in—that one might envisage. It is a much more considered, steady, incremental approach. Indeed, we are developing the actual IT by using elements and units of what we have much more incrementally than it might seem from outside. That is one of the things that I will try to show noble Lords when we have the presentation; indeed, it will be a wider presentation for all parliamentarians. I see that a few in the Room may be very interested.