Iain Duncan Smith has resigned

I see what you mean. Honestly though, the UC implementation is a million miles away from being anything like fully functional and we are looking at the benefits system going to hell in a handbasket in quite a short timescale. I can see millions of people being overpaid or being left without money. The good news is some DWP offices are going back to offering some form of face to face service. The call center approach has not been a success (surprise, surprise), although it will still be the first point of contact. It's bad now, but it's going to get much worse.

Last time I read about it, it was only 200,000 on UC.
Everywhere it has been rolled out, it is only for single people, I think.

I didn't think I'd ever feel sorry for a Tory, but I feel sorry for Stephen Crabb, having to try and make sense of this mess. Why didn't Cameron appoint someone who'd been working in the department before?
I suppose nobody wanted it.

It's only been single people without mortgages so far (IT can't handle them), but this week or next UC is due to ramp up to take any kind of new claim - see that pig flying past the window?

What the DWP needs to do is reinstate some form of genuine advisors rather than the ridiculous Work Programme. A couple of years ago I made a Freedom of Information request to try and find out how much the private Work Programme providers are costing, but the DWP wriggled out of providing the figures, because (allegedly) there were so many of them and each one had a separate budget.

I've been on a Work Programme course and it was farcical. I actually wrote a blog about it at the time and had hundreds of supportive comments. I knew exactly what kind of support I needed to find work and asked for it, but it wasn't available.

Something people in their sixties possibly don't realise about UC is that over 60 year olds are now expected to look for full-time work, whereas with working tax credits they were only expected to work 16 hours a week. The single self-employed are effectively excluded from UC.

Just out of interest daphne have the hours changed for single parents?

"In the UK, we live in a country where you can read that the Work and Pensions secretary has pledged a ‘relentless focus’ on improving life chances and that the DWP is spending £100,000 on lawyers to fight a rape victim and the family of a severely disabled child. What does that tell us about our society?"

Stephen Crabb is no improvement on his predecessor.

www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/apr/12/stephen-crabb-relentless-focus-improving-life-chances-welfare-universal-credit

www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/government-spends-100000-on-lawyers-to-defend-the-bedroom-tax-a6956886.html

I'm not 100% sure about this, gracesgran, but I think they've changed.

My understanding with JSA and working tax credits is that a single parent with a child under 16 can limit hours for 'caring responsibilities'. In other words he/she can limit hours to school time only.

This has been changed to 13.

Any single parent with a child over 13 is expected to look for full-time (40 hours a week) work.

By the way, dj, your first link shows why the government includes pensions in the 'welfare budget'.

Crabb described the vast social security system – which he said had an annual budget greater than the entire GDP of Portugal – as a “people business” that had to understand the “human impact of the decisions we take”.

The latest GDP of Portugal is £161 bn. Total spending on benefits and tax credits in the UK is expected to be £217 bn for 2015/6, which is indeed bigger than Portugal's GDP.

HOWEVER over half of the UK's welfare spending is on pensions and benefits for the elderly. The UK actually spends about £105 bn (much less than Portugal's GDP) on all other non-pension benefits.

Tut tut, Mr Crabb! He's already learned how to be selective with his facts.

The GNP per capita of Portugal is half of ours. Their population is less than ten million.
I imagine our GDP per capita has been greatly skewed by the fact that we have a lot more millionnaires, too.
So why did he choose Portugal? Was it the only EU country to fit in with his preconceptions?

I would imagine he had to make a speech in a hurry and wanted to highlight how huge the 'welfare' budget is, so some bright spark came up with a statistic which seems superficially impressive until you delve a bit deeper.

The Tories have used the 'total welfare' figure before, without mentioning that it includes the state pension, pension credit, TV licences, winter fuel allowance and bus passes. It suits their agenda.

Thanks for the details daphnedill. I am all for any single parent working full time from as early as possible as the days so believing it is "best" for the child that the mother is at home are long gone. I only have to look at my children (in their late 30s early 40s) and their friends to see how well working parents bring up their children.

My worry would be that for single parents we must help with or provide child care so that they can do this and I wonder if that is happening.

I agree with you, Gg. My children were 8 and 3 when I became a single parent and I carried on working full-time. I earned too much for tax credits, but childcare still crippled me financially, as I wasn't getting any maintenance from their father. It also exhausted me.

I don't know many details about the current situation for single parents, but I know nursery fees have gone up and tax credits have gone down. I was quite a high earner and barely coped, so I don't see how it's possible for anybody on a low wage.

Single parents have been hit hard by benefit changes over the last few years and I believe Universal Credit is about to hit them harder. I also believe that there should be measures to help single parents stay in work/find work, because it's very easy to fall into a downward spiral of poverty and depression. Parents need support, because the end result will be that the children suffer.

As well as making it better for the men and women in this position and for their children daphne I think it would be better for the exchequer. We have many working years without children at home when people would hopefully reap thebenefits of continuing to work and, there is the example set for the children. The government talks about "help into work" but I have yet to really see it happening.

I agree once again. One of the biggest problems for unemployed single parents is that they lose touch with the workplace and it becomes an uphill struggle to find a foothold. They often need refresher courses and/or upskilling/retraining, but what's being offered is very superficial and low quality.

Anybody can get career development loans to do decent courses, but benefits then get cut, because the claimant is deemed as not prepared to work. Affordable breakfast, after-school clubs and school holiday schemes have also been hit by cuts to local authorities. Unless single parents have family support, which many don't, they find themselves in a no-win situation.

The only work available to single parents restricted to school hours is low paid, such as caring, school cook, etc. When the children are old enough to look after themselves, single parents often find they have lost 10-15 years from their CV.

I agree with you that it would make financial sense for the individuals and the country as a whole to keep single parents working, but as you write the current system is punitive and does very little to support anybody. Meanwhile, Work Programme providers are raking it in! Ggggrrrr!

www.theguardian.com/society/2016/apr/14/dwp-punishing-low-paid-full-time-workers-under-new-benefits-rule

The above article explains how low paid workers, many of them single parents who are trying their best to earn money, will be affected by Universal Credit. A number of organisations and charities have estimated that about 200,000 single parents will lose benefits, apart from the effect on their long-term job prospects.

This is all a far cry from the original mantra of "making work pay".

Making work pay like we are all in it together was just an attempt to fool people, sadly it succeeded with some

www.politics.co.uk/news/2016/04/14/revealed-dwp-fought-to-keep-serious-problems-with-universal

It's taken four years for this to come out. Another reason why IDS resigned.

Another sick part of universal credit.

www.theguardian.com/society/2016/apr/14/dwp-punishing-low-paid-full-time-workers-under-new-benefits-rule

A woman who wored 30-40 hours on a zero hours contract was supposed to attend an interview to show her how to get more work. She had booked a holiday before she went on UC, but they told her being on holiday was no excuse not to look for work and fined her £220.

I'd like to hear a Tory try to justify this.Did you really vote for it?

Worked, sorry, not wored.

www.crimeandjustice.org.uk/resources/preventable-harm-government-policy

Someone who has been doing research into the WCA for six years.

Being on holiday justified the PM and the business secretary from doing anything to help the steel workers keep their jobs

Perhaps they should be fined, proportionally, of course. After all we do pay their benefits.

www.disabilitynewsservice.com/tribunal-rules-dwp-must-release-information-from-secret-benefit-deaths-reviews/

Who voted for this, then?

www.thenational.scot/comment/lesley-riddoch-the-reality-of-the-dwps-horrific-sanctions-regime.16318

Some of you voted for this government to be allowed to do this.
I hope you are ashamed.