Rishi Sunak has blamed a “complicated” IT system for not raising welfare benefits now to shield the most vulnerable from the cost-of-living crisis.
The Treasury this week downplayed a suggestion made by Boris Johnson that further help would be made available within days and some Tory MPs have privately argued it may be needed before the summer.
Asked about further benefits support, Mr Sunak replied: “The operation of our welfare system is technically complicated. It is not necessarily possible to [increase benefits] for everybody.
“Many of the systems are built so it can only be done once a year, and the decision was taken quite a while ago.”
The Chancellor said his answer “sounds like an excuse” but insisted he had been “constrained somewhat by the operation of the welfare system”.
A spokesman for the Department for Work and Pensions told Bloomberg that benefits programmes involved “complex and inefficient paper-based systems that are slowed further by ageing, inflexible IT”, with changes taking "several months to process."
A report published by the Public Accounts Committee warned some of the systems used by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) had been "unfit for purpose" for decades.
Technology dating back to 1988
MPs on the committee said millions of pensioner records were kept on an IT system that not only dated back to 1988, but was also "intrinsically vulnerable" to errors.
Simon McKinnon, the top technologist at the DWP, said in committee evidence in 2019 it would take "many years" to move away from the decades-old technology.
“The state pension is run through a 30-year old system, but we have [rebuilt] parts of it – the 'Check your state pension' [service] has 12.5million page views in the last year,” he said at the time.
He admitted "legacy systems" were "very critical to what we deliver... It is going to take many years, but it is our ambition to move away from them in due course."
Some new systems are set to run in parallel with the ageing technology, with data and applications moved across gradually, while some will be replaced straight away.
Mr Sunak announced changes to National Insurance, fuel duty cuts and £500million for councils to help vulnerable people mitigate rising costs in his Spring Statement in March.
He had previously set out a £9billion plan, covering around 28million Britons, in the wake of the soaring cost of energy, food and fuel in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the pandemic.
A £20 weekly uplift for Universal Credit claimants, introduced by ministers as an emergency measure during the Covid crisis, came to an end in October.
In an interview with Bloomberg TV, Mr Sunak reiterated that ministers remain “very committed” in their aim to level up the entire United Kingdom after an analysis found London had continued to pull ahead of much of the rest of the country since the 2019 general election.
“What does it mean to me? It means making sure people, wherever they happen to grow up and live in the UK, feel that they’ve got fantastic opportunities ahead of them and they’ve also got enormous pride in the place they get to call home,” he said.
On the Northern Ireland Protocol, meanwhile, Mr Sunak echoed the Government's position that the current arrangement has posed “enormous challenges to the stability of the situation in Northern Ireland”.
“You can see it’s become a power to re-establishing power-sharing in Northern Ireland, it doesn’t have cross-community consent, and that’s a very serious situation that needs resolving.
“And our preference is to have, and always has been to have, a negotiated settlement with our European friends and partners and no decision has been taken about what the future direction might be.”
