Iain Duncan Smith makes his bid for a job in Boris's cabinet and at the same time distances himself from the looming disaster that is Universal Credit.

Pretty much.

What's universal credit?

It's a benefits system that is supposed to combine a persons benefit payments into one single payment.

Rather than getting separate payments for Job Seekers Allowance (unemployment benefit), housing benefit, child benefit etc etc, you get one payment combining them all.

Some others here will know more than me about this.

From the outside it seems like a nice idea, more efficient etc, it was brought in as a way to make savings on the benefits system, but it has been a complete fuck up being implemented, DWP staff not knowing how it all works, not being trained properly etc.

Combine that with the current and last government's quest to slash the benefit bill and it becomes an even bigger mess.

Something that's cropped up here from time to time is the idea of a guaranteed annual income, aka 'mincome', so if your income falls below a certain threshold, the government pays you instead of you paying income tax. Which may be a further simplification of the universal credit you speak of, with (theoretically) less bureaucracy and attendant hassles and expenses involved. IIRC some jursidiction recently started running a test of it in place of traditional welfare.

Not sure how many still remain, or how much is paid, but we have/had tax credits where people who were working and had low income or certain circumstances got some form of benefit paid. Whilst that brings people/families up to a minimum level of income (which is a good thing), it is basically subsiding low pay from employers.

It 'sounds' like a clever idea. Don't worry about 20 different welfare types, just have 1 for all situations. But then you think, does that really improve things? The claimants are still claiming for exactly the same reasons so that has to be assessed, granted or refused and paid exactly as before, in every case and for every type of claim. None of the rules for receipt of the different welfare types are the same and these rules aren't changing to unify assessment. In fact, all that's happening is a vastly (and I mean vastly) complex set of changes both in administration and IT to achieve what exactly? 

It's as though somebody decided that all car types must have the same name. Don't have all the complexity of Fords, Fiats, Toyotas and so on, we'll call them all Unicars. That'll be so much easier.


Edited to (hopefully) make the point clearer

The other thing is raising minimum wage and making sure that employers aren't dodging labour standards with e.g. contract and part-time employees filling what are really permanent, full-time positions.

You have a point, but are there really 20 different kinds? Here we basically have two: unemployment and disability.

Oh yes, job-seekers (formerly unemployment), carers, disability, attendance, bereavement, child benefit and so on...up to about fifty*

There's no denying that it could be simplified. Like many systems in this great nation, benefits have proliferated and grown as did the proverbial African American child in the story by Mrs. Beecher Stowe.

However, the jump from many to one is plain ridiculous.

*that may be an exaggeration

It all boils down to the same thing: needs income support.