Coronavirus is shining a light on the wretched universal credit system | Daniel Lavelle
A million people, myself included, have turned to UC in Britain's lockdown. Now we will see the ordeals claimants face
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British governments are notoriously bad at recognising a crisis until it impacts them, or their class, directly. London's pioneering sanitation system was not developed until the cholera epidemics of the early 19th century had reached parliament's windows, with the "Great Stink" wafting in from the Thames. Similarly, now that the middle classes are sharing the same unemployment line as the people who serve them their morning lattes, welfare reform has become a priority.
Nearly a million new universal credit (UC) claims have exposed the government's boasts about the UK being the "jobs factory of Europe" for the thinly veiled lie that it is. Yes, last year UK unemployment fell to its lowest level since January 1975; and the Office for National Statistics found that the UK employment rate in the three months to January 2020 was at a joint record high of 76.5%. But this all looks less fantastic when you dig a little deeper into those figures. Almost 1 million workers are on zero-hours contracts, which means there's no guarantee that the individuals who comprise those stats are the same from one day to the next.
Related: The middle class are about to discover the cruelty of Britain's benefits system | Polly Toynbee
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