It’s a bit pointless asking whether the Prime Minister has confidence in Iain Duncan Smith, so this morning his spokesman was asked a slightly different question: why does the Prime Minister have confidence in Iain Duncan Smith?
The spokesman replied:
‘Because the Secretary of State is leading this very important programme of welfare reform, which is so important to the economy and is the right thing to do on the grounds of fairness as well.’
He argued that the delay to the rollout of the credit was ‘absolutely the right thing’ because ‘the Universal Credit rollout was designed to be a gradual process that enables the project to take on board findings from the pilots and rollout process and to build on those. That is absolutely the right thing to be doing.’
The spokesman added:
‘We have always had a, there has always been rollout timetable, but the wrong thing to do which, you know, the wrong thing to do would be what may have happened in previous years, is to have these complicated projects you just keep going to the end and then you are faced with having to try and retrofit the IT, which leads to very large scale disruption of people who are already in the scheme.
Britain’s best politics newsletters
You get two free articles each week when you sign up to The Spectator’s emails.
Already a subscriber? Log in
Comments
Join the debate for just £1 a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just £1 a monthAlready a subscriber? Log in