Universal Credit

Debate between Richard Drax and Nigel Mills

Wednesday 6th March 2013 Commons Chamber

[Nigel Mills (Amber Valley) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the Chair of the Work and Pensions Committee and to speak about the report. This is the first report that I had the pleasure of working on when I joined the Committee. I feel slightly guilty in that I missed all the evidence sessions because I did not join the Committee until it started to write the report. I therefore missed the hard work and did the fun bit at the end.

I should probably start where the Chair of the Select Committee finished—the complex IT system. Those of us who have followed the news of new, large IT systems from the outside over many years would be brave or foolish to be entirely optimistic that a new, super IT system will work flawlessly from day one. Perhaps the Minister will assure us that that will be the case, that the IT has worked in the various tests and trials, and that it will work when we switch over to having live feeds of millions of entries from HMRC.

[Richard Drax (South Dorset) (Con)]

I, too, am concerned about putting all our eggs in one IT basket. Would it not be sensible to retain the staff in local authorities—in my constituency, they are about to be laid off—so that there is a back-up, at least until it is proved that the system works?