But We Never Really Meant It For Vulnerable Claimants Anyway

The Duncan Smith brilliance of the Universal Credit system ("the beleaguered Universal Credit system", as its full designation appears to be) has received yet another boost thanks to research commissioned by the great man's own Department for Workfare and Privation. Three London councils used DWP data and a methodology which Whitehall agreed was doctrinally sound, and discovered that they would need to spend about six million pounds each in order to train vulnerable claimants who might otherwise be unable to afford an extra jumper to wear in winter. Even Duncan Smith's pet think-tank, the humorously-named Centre for Social Justice, has already warned about the possibility of unmanageable levels of debt, despite three years of kicking people out of work, lowering wages and slashing social security. This is doubtless old news to the Government, which has never really believed that vulnerable benefits claimants need do anything except starve, stack shelves or move out of London; and at the very least it will provide a handy excuse to throw more taxpayers' money at the likes of G4S and Serco in return for some fake figures about helping the mumbling idiots get online.