Welfare Reform Bill

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Knight, for his self-declaration. He is an enthusiast for IT and the changes that it can produce, but he also recognises the difficulties which could overtake anyone who is trying to undertake such a major change as this. It is very difficult. I shall not repeat much of what he said, but his last point is: what happens if we fail with an IT structure that does not deliver the welfare reform that we are looking for? I think that, more than anyone else getting the blame, the political class as a whole will get the blame for a structure under which individuals would suffer. So it is very important to get it right. Unfortunately, we tend to roll a number of words together. I suppose you might say that the universal credit depends on a substantial, reliable, appropriate and functioning IT system. I have used the phrase ““IT system””, which is probably not the correct phrase because we tend to throw these words around. I use a series of analogies, and I hope that noble Lords will bear with me. I used the phrase ““daisy chain”” because it is the easiest way to describe linking between one system and the next. In essence, there is a number of inputs into the IT structure, some of them from employers and some from potential claimants, and all those pieces of data have to be linked together—hence the phrase ““daisy chain””. If you break the daisy change, clearly you do not complete the circle and the person does not get paid at the end. None of those changes will be possible without substantial shifts, in recent years, in the IT platforms that we have available to us in order to deliver such as programme. If we are going to make this work, we have to ensure that all those parts are working. Of course, there are—most noble Lords would recognise this—two substantial departments of government, both of which have a hand in ensuring that this works. I do not know, but there are plenty of people who will tell me, whether the relationship between the two big departments, Her Majesty's Treasury and DWP, works as one might hope. If that were the case, you would be looking for the sort of regime where one department was trying to exercise responsibility over another. I hope that that has not happened. I hope that there is genuine cross-departmental working. My first question for my noble friend is: who is taking responsibility? Is DWP sitting in the driving seat, as that is the hub from which all this will happen, and is HMRC material coming across to it in the way that DWP prescribes in order to achieve the result? My second question relates to the passing on of data. One of the lessons that we and the world have learnt about the passing on of individual items of data connected together is that there is now an international standard for data passing. I would like reassurance from the Minister that we are using the correct ISO standard for the passing on of data. If we are, we can be reassured that not only are we able to pass it on from one department to another, but that it can be passed on to any other part of the system in the public or private sectors, or whoever else wants that piece of data, and that it has the same level of acceptability from one to the other. I would like a reassurance—particularly on what happens at the end, the starting point of which is this data from employers—that we are going to be using and transferring the employer's data at that ISO level, and that there will be no ““Well, we'll do it this way to start with and move on to a better way later””. I want to be reassured that that happens, because without it we would have some difficulty in achieving the result we want to see. I do not believe that scaling up is the big issue. Often when IT systems are rolled out, you start off with a small number of pilots which you build up. I believe that the Minister—we will certainly know this next week—has started by profiling this in a small way and building it up inside the DWP system. This problem is not one about the IT system we have at the DWP; it is about the appropriateness of passing on that data in a daisy-chain way. In a question I put in the Chamber last week I referred to a tube of data. Another analogy that makes it somewhat easier is that you are passing these items of data between one system, one platform, and another, and that you need to make sure that the data going between them meet those top international standards. My final point, which the noble Lord might refer to as the 80 per cent rule, is about the number of people inputting their information online. Over time that will be magnified. It is rather like the time when somebody walked in front of a car with a red flag thinking that the driver could not possibly be trusted on their own. IT will become the norm as people use it. You only have to look at the number of people using handheld devices not just as a phone but for everything else to understand that there is that big shift in our society taking place. I have another question for the Minister, which is about the other end. If we are introducing an IT system right the way through, delivery to people's bank accounts—or whatever accounts they have at the end—is the consequence of this. But there are still some people in this country who like, desire, or want to have no bank account. Some want to be paid in cash or get paid in cash. For them, this system will probably need some level of adjustment. What is the Minister doing to move people into bank accounts—or some form of banking—that will give them an opportunity to be paid directly in the way that the system would expect? There will always be people who fall out of this system and who have not followed the pattern right through. I have a great deal of trust in the Minister, who also has enthusiasm for all these issues. But we all need to be reassured not just that the DWP has got it right, but also that HMT has got it right, and that we can be reassured that this will make sure that we follow the latest in international standards to ensure that people at the end will get the benefits which this system is designed to meet. Nothing would be worse than to have a system designed to achieve all the objectives that we have set out—lifting people out of poverty, moving people into work and so forth—if at the end we fail because the machinery, or the people who were designing the machinery, let us down.