Amber Rudd left the Home Office over the Windrush scandal and has joined the Work and Pensions department just as its flagship benefits reform is under fire from all angles. The new Secretary of State spent most of her first session at the dispatch box this afternoon answering questions on Universal Credit – and she had arrived determined to strike a rather different tone from her predecessor.
Esther McVey, who resigned from the role last week, had garnered a reputation for being rather hardline when dealing with criticisms of the benefit roll-out, while also managing to give far more away about some of its problems than Number 10 would have liked. Rudd, meanwhile, lost her job earlier this year partly because she had decided to follow Theresa May’s footsteps rather too faithfully in creating a ‘hostile environment’ for immigration. Now she joins at a time of great instability, both for the Prime Minister and Universal Credit, and therefore the new Cabinet minister needed to show that she wasn’t just going to stick her fingers in her ears and pretend that everything was alright.
When Rudd was appointed, her critics pointed out that she had been forced to resign after appearing not to know what had been going on in her own department when the Windrush revelations began to surface.
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