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Universal Credit: Managed Migration

My Lords, I think that my noble friend asked for Parliament to be able to debate the report on the pilot before the regulations are laid, because it is very disappointing that, although the Secretary of State said that the Government continued to listen to Members of this House to optimise the system, they do not seem terribly interested in what we might have had to say about the pilot. I think that we could have come up with some constructive thoughts on that pilot, so that is disappointing.

I welcome the fact no one will lose their legacy benefits if they do not move on to universal credit during the pilot and what the Secretary of State called the “who knows you” approach, but how far will it be possible to learn lessons about the potential dangers of the widely criticised hard stop that my noble friend referred to once managed migration is fully rolled out? Because then, of course, that will no longer apply; people will lose their legacy benefits. And how easy will it be to scale up this approach nationally when the local support networks that the Government are very much relying on here are so variable and, in some places, pretty thin and probably getting thinner with local authority cuts? Also, the staff to claimant ratio is likely to be rather worse than it is for the pilot. So, just how much can we learn from this pilot in terms of what the fully scaled managed migration will look like?