Iain Duncan Smith is taking the fight to Labour today, accusing them of being the ‘party of welfare’ with their ‘heads in the sand’ as he marks the next ‘roll-out’ of Universal Credit. Families will be able to receive the benefit for the first time from now on, with the ‘roll-out’ starting in the north-west of England.
The Work and Pensions Secretary was typically tetchy when confronted with the suggestion on the Today programme that his flagship reform had been beset by problems, saying:
‘Would you rather us take a gamble? Throw everything at it at once? Have a problem like tax credits where nobody got their money and it was a real disaster?’
He accused Mishal Husain of wanting ‘to try and look at this in an utterly negative way’, and argued that it was better to implement the reform slowly and get it right, rather than make a mess of it.
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